From the Home of Mirka Mora

Mirka Mora is one of Melbourne’s most colourful personalities and best-loved artists. This exhibition celebrates Mirka’s sixty-year association with Heide and her close ties with John and Sunday Reed.

Drawn from the treasure trove of her private collection of paintings, soft-sculpture dolls, tapestries and sketchbooks, the exhibition brings a sense of Mirka’s home to Heide II, the modernist home of the Reeds. It reveals many objects and images never before seen by the public, all created in Mirka’s sensuous, naïve style and marked by her idiosyncratic iconography of recurring motifs, from children, dogs and birds to angels, devils and snakes.

Arriving in Melbourne from Paris in 1951, Mirka and her husband Georges contributed significantly to the local art scene and the city’s gradual transformation into a sophisticated metropolis. Her studio at 9 Collins Street became a hub for Melbourne’s bohemian set, which transferred to Mirka Café in Exhibition Street and later the Moras other restaurants, Balzac and Tolarno.

Connecting with the Reeds early on, Mirka observed how to know them was to ‘sharpen your sensitivity’ for they ‘could read a painting like a musician can read music’. To her they were more than friends ‘because they could read my soul’.