Sydney

AND NOW features works from the second decade of Judith Neilson’s White Rabbit Collection. Here, nothing is as it seems. A lone figure washes the body of a dead whale, atoning for destruction wrought by man; rolls of flesh become an omen of relentless progress; diaphanous flags offer the invitation of passage only to deny it moments later; despair is written in salt; glass masquerades as stone; and, with a touch of futility, silkworms enshroud ancient wood as though to stay the hand of ecological collapse.Profound and multifaceted, quiet and melancholy, the artists speak of transformation, redemption and loss. Their shared language is one of allegory; time resides here in poetry.

White Rabbit

AND NOW 

The agitated image – James Lieutenant’s Giving up the ghost at Galerie pompomI suppose it was the cocktail of rain and my faltering mental health that made my heart race. It was four in the morning and I was about to ride my stolen bicycle to the job that I loathed. From the kitchen window, I looked across the soupy darkness of our backyard and saw a face looking back at me from the garden bed. In a single film frame, I jolted from my disoriented stupor to rigid panic. I quickly paced down the hall, convincing myself that I had only seen my reflection in the glass. The other half of me was intent on believing that I had seen a ghost. How could my eyes deceive me?

Galerie pompom

Give up the Ghost

A glistening shipwreck rests in a darkened gallery: a monument to the past and spectre of our future.

First Draft

Rib Wreck

Raw Hide explores the political, religious and historical significance of cow hide – as a material of governance and authority, upon which manuscripts and laws have been etched. The exhibition seeks to understand the relationship between what has been written upon parchment and internalised in the body of man and society.

Raw Hide

Argileh at Wedding Cake Rock is a satirical exhibition which nods to culture, tradition and ethnicity in the digital age. The exhibition explores the intersection of experimental and documentary style photography through a series of tableaux; constructed from surreal appropriations of Western Sydney neighbourhoods. The works are a reflection of both personal experience and an ongoing engagement with local personas, neighbourhoods, cultural motifs and trends.

Argileh at Wedding Cake Rock

Friendship as a Way of Life’ brings together more than 20 artists and collaborative groups to explore queer kinship and forms of being together. The exhibition centres around three ideas that offer perspectives on LGBTQI+ partnerships, collaboration, visibility, sex, intimacy and knowledge: ‘Public Relations’ (the public expression of private lives and forms of communicating identities); ‘Living Arrangements’ (spaces and approaches to living/being with ‘chosen families’); and ‘Intergenerational Kinship’ (learning, sharing and support across generations). Presented across the entire gallery and online, this major project seeks to foreground the way LGBTQI+ communities create alternative networks of support through various creative and resourceful means.

UNSW Galleries

Friendship as a Way of Life

Shine is a solo exhibition of recent works by local artist Amanda Gosse. The focus of this collection of acrylic paintings is the beauty of colour, translucency and illusiveness in the light and reflection that occurs in nature and in everyday objects.

Mosman Art Gallery

Shine

Station Gallery 

Invisible Line

Phenemar

We have reversed the evolution of manned flight by taking Australian Air Force surplus plane parts and with a bit of paint and string, turned them back into kites. Japanese kites are not representative of a culturally hermetic system and are therefore a great visual example of transculturation. Our aim is to re-focus on the here and now without suffering from cultural myopia.—Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

Roslyn Oxley9 

Featuring works by Tom Polo, Gareth Sansom, and Jenny Watson; all three artists are expressive, gestural and considered in their mark making - masterful colourists conjuring up vivid, fantastical realms, yet their unique styles have paved their way as distinct voices within the Australian and international art world.

A painting show

While laying on her back Virginia Woolf once remarked “I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there…” Anyone who can recall being a child and obsessively finding faces – or cats claws, or sleeping sling-shots, or amoebic cereal puffs, or mermaid tails – in the undulating cloud clad sky: that person will recall the lucid, unequivocal chaw of recognition. It feels sonic – like an umbilical go-between to our visual pleasure centre. Like reading clouds, the images that surface and sink back into Nathan Hawkes’ drawings function like a sort of Rorschach inkblot- where we, the beguiled, see things. (Or do we?)

Chalk Horse

Real Worlds: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2020

Jerico Contemporary is delighted to present our first exhibition of 2021 and debut collaborative show between Australian artists Anna Harrison and Matthew Graeme Johnson, ‘Stillness Is A Fiction’

Jerico Contemporary

Stillness is a fiction

My work is best described as abstract and surreal landscapes using mixed media. This new body of work is a made up of canvases, paper works and slip cast ceramic canvases. Subject matter comes from a fascination with naive cartoon like figures, graffiti patterns, photography and streetscapes. A lot of concepts derive from my own photographs, which I like to dissect and use as black and white collage pieces

gaffa

Fondest Regards

What happens to the imagination that escapes capture?What happens to all the unexpressed thoughts, all the hope and dreams that remain unfulfilled?In this series the artist takes famous objects of jewellery and art, symbols of status and wealth and uses them as subject matter to explore the boundaries between painting and drawing. Decorative sculpture is deconstructed, the door to the House of Faberge is kicked down, it’s priceless eggs reduced to little more than Kinder Surprise for oligarchs and plutocrats.Andrew Ensor is a Sydney based artist who’s drawing practice uses pen and acrylic on paper to create a unique language of visual themes, poetry and metaphysics. This is his 35th solo exhibition.

An uncaptured imagination

In the Dutch summer of 2019 I began sharing a small studio in the forests on the edge of The Hague.I started drawing and moved to oil painting in the late summer and autumn. While I originally planned to use the studio as a base and move about the forests and dunes to work, I ultimately worked in lockdown in the clearing by the Princessetuin garden, painting the same view again and again.The shuttered windows wrapped around the studio allowed natural light and a safe way to communicate, occasionally, with passers by as more and more people found their only way to get out of the house was a walk in nature.

Ontmoeten in de bos (A chance meeting in the forest))

A major survey exhibition of works by Peter Kingston focusing on his passion for Sydney harbour in his paintings and drawings.

Shervin Gallery

First Light: the art of Peter Kingston

This major exhibition brings together recent works by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, investigating listening practices and extractive industries in Australia.‘Untitled (Death Song)’ 2020 comprises sound sculptures constructed from discarded mining and industrial equipment accompanied by a soundtrack made in collaboration with musician and instrument builder Isha Ram Das. It takes its first note from the haunting cries of the yellow-eyed Bush Stone-curlew. An endangered species within New South Wales, the Bush Stone-curlew is known for its distinctive call, a ghost-like “weer-lo” sound. Heard in chorus and crescendo with other Bush Stone-curlews, the eerie call is often mistaken for a crying baby or wailing woman. ‘Untitled (Death Song)’ is a meditation on the sound of Country and Gurrell (Curlew), also known as a harbinger of death in Quandamooka culture. Megan Cope writes: “The threatened status of the bird not only registers significant ecological change and the impact of modern agricultural land management; it is a harbinger, a warning for the future.”The exhibition also features several related projects, including the sound sculpture ‘Old Kahibah’ 2018, which maps the sound vibrations of Awabakal Country in the Lake Macquarie area which has experienced significant geological alteration from industrial coal extraction. Presented alongside are sculptural works from the ‘Extractions’ 2020-21 series that reimagines industrial materials such as concrete.

Fractures and Frequencies

The Care Project (2018-2021) is a research project led by Jacqueline Millner, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University. Through roundtables, symposia, exhibitions and publications, the project explores how care ethics might realise the values revolution needed to address the existential threats we face, including environmental destruction, critical social inequality and reconstructing a post-COVID world. Care ethics proposes that abolishing the (gendered) hierarchy between ‘care’—the activities of social reproduction that nurture individuals and sustain social bonds—and economic production might be a way forward. What would it mean to substitute care for economics as the central concern of politics? The project facilitates analysis, reflections and speculations on how contemporary artists and creative practitioners engage with, interpret, and enact care in practices which might forge an alternative ethics in the age of neoliberalism.

Stanley Street Gallery

The Care Project

Patrizia Biondi’s practice is interested in the language of materials and the concepts underlying the processes used to transform such materials into objects of beauty.Her artworks are made with recovered cardboard packaging – a choice of medium which emerges from her concern about humanity’s growing immersion in excessive consumerism. Such preoccupation with disproportionate consumption is related to the environmental destruction generated by interminable industrial production and by the unprecedented, overwhelming amounts of waste. Therefore, the materials employed are fundamental to the narrative of Biondi’s pieces as packaging inevitably infers consumerism, storage, advertising, global transport, aesthetic appeal, obsolescence and, ultimately, a globalised economy relying on endless consumption to safeguard its own survival.

Artereal Gallery

It's A Circus Out There

In this new exhibition Wendy Sharpe will create a series of major new site specific ephemeral mural paintings specifically designed for the exhibition spaces within the Mosman Art Gallery. The ephemeral mural works will be accompanied by other oil paintings and works on paper from Sharpe’s studio based practice that explore the intersection between the real and the imagined worlds - the seen and unseen - and our human experiences of the spirit world

Ghosts

Welcoming the New Year invites you to celebrate the beginning of 2021 by immersing yourself in uplifting and inspiring art! This vibrant show features the work of an extensive selection of diverse contemporary artists working across a wide variety of media and styles.

Australian Galleries

Roylston Street Group Exhibition

SKIN DEEP is an interactive exhibition that presents intimate and personal stories of LGBTQI people through their tattooed bodies and stories, celebrating diversity, defiance and body art.The Exhibition is made up of several unique components – presented as one integrated audience experience or as separate experiences. LGBTQI community participation is central to all components of SKIN DEEP – as narrators, models, story tellers andperformers.

Cell Block Theatre

QUEER CONTEMPORARY: SKIN DEEP

“Unsolicited Advice! is a new body of work drawn from a lifetime of awkward, and often insensitive, unsolicited advice I am given after people discover I am disabled. This text-based textile installation deconstructs these interactions, amplifying all the cliché, ill-informed and thoughtless advice disabled people are accustomed to hearing – and highlighting the absurdity of our need to save, change or fix disabled people.

firstdraft

Unsolicited Advice!

In our annual pairing of an early career Asia-Pacific artist with an esteemed international artist, Cement Fondu presents Samoan New Zealander Christopher Ulutupu alongside US artistic duo Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, whose critically acclaimed multimedia installations have been exhibited at the Prada Foundation, Milan (2019), the Venice Biennale (2013) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006).Despite their different cultural backgrounds and polar opposite aesthetic sensibilities, the pairing highlights potent similarities and fascinating divergences around the performance of identity in relationship to place, speaking to ‘homelands’ and colonisation, tourism and new encounters.

Cement Fondu — Black Birds

ATTENTION TOURIST

Saint Cloche is pleased to reveal emerging Sydney artist David Whitworth with his debut solo exhibition ‘Falling Awake’.This beguiling body of work is Inspired by a book – ‘Falling Awake’, that’s lived on David’s bedside table for many years. He loves the way author, Alice Oswald’s words describe her relationship with the natural world, born of close observation and engagement over time. The rhythm of familiar places that are known by walking repeatedly, which become new again by looking and noticing the day-to-day transformations and seasonal changes.

Saint Cloche

Falling Awake

Following on from a successful first Solo Show and debut at Sydney Contemporary 2019, ‘FANTASIA’, Saint Cloche proudly presents ‘GIANT’ – A highly anticipated new body of work from award-winning, multi-disciplinary designer and sought after artist, Evi O.Evi is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to creativity, colour and shape. Running a design practise that exposes her to 3D forms, and spatial design brings a unique dimension to her artworks as well as a huge sense of clarity. Bold compositions are balanced with decadent combinations of colours. Evi O captures energy, her narratives are human and offer visual and emotional escapism to her audience.

Giant

This is the mark made by a being who exists in a dimension unpierced by the arrow of time. We respond to it because we too exist in that same dimension although our programming denies it. This is the reality of the little things that exist without calculation or cynicism. The little things that just are.

The Little Things

My materials are my words and they are not dictated, they come from the same embryonic silence from which the art is born. They are potent and charged with the politics of my body. In the cacophony of these heightened times, it is this silence that I return to, that I know to be true.—Kirtika Kain

Stone Idols

Decision Fatigue

Yinjaa-Barni Art is a collective of Aboriginal artists who predominantly belong to the Yindjibarndi language group and whose ancestral homelands surround the Fortescue River and Millstream Tablelands.Based in Roebourne, a small town in Western Australia’s Pilbara region of the north-west of the state, the Yinjaa-Barni artists create deeply personal works of collective memory, rendering the wildflowers, river systems and landforms of their country onto canvas.

Paintings from the Pilbara

Jerico Contemporary is delighted to present our fourth solo exhibition with Australian artist Luke Chiswell, ‘no good, no good, good’. The exhibition will continue through to Saturday 27th February 2021.

‘NO GOOD, NO GOOD, GOOD’

Constructed from limited edition embroidered badges, this body of work examines the potential of the multiple and the visual dialogue between surface pattern and a 3d expression of that pattern.Despite the standardisation, and apparent identical visual aesthetics of the original design, each badge is unique as an outcome of the inevitable thread quirks within the machine-made output.

Editions in Dialogue

Becoming Bishoujo is a synthesis of my on-going exploration into kawaii (cute) culture, investigated through the lens of craft and psychoanalysis. The title of the exhibition denotes my particular interest in the “bishoujo”(beautiful young girl) as a sign, and how she magnifies the infantilisation and pornification of society. The bishoujo is what countless young women in East Asia ascribe to be, it’s conception demonstrates that gender is very much asocial construct. To appropriate the famous provocation by Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a bishoujo.” Drawing influences from manga, anime and video games, I construct narratives in which the bishoujo perform as surrogates for women who are often wandering along the periphery of a phallocentric social fabric, allowing the folds and creases of our emotions and psyche to be materialized. These bishoujo oscillate between the sweet and the perverse, the infantile and the adult, in a world where reality and fantasy, the imaginary and the symbolic, are increasingly superimposed.

Becoming Bishoujo

"This work seeks to take a close up and intimate view of the interactions between these forever-proliferating by-products of neoliberal economies of scale, and the world they are overtaking."

2 Mintues to Midnight

Nuha Saad works with optimism and a modernist inheritance turning to colour and abstraction in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Saad’s work identifies with both western art training and an eastern sensibility. The works exhibited in The Folly of Colour demonstrate the feeling of being in-between different cultural experiences. In the exhibition eastern forms bump up against the hard geometries of minimalist and formalist tendencies alike, but in a gentle way. One side supports the other, completes it and balances it formally.

 The Folly of Colour

Where cities evolve in contentious circumstances and make the transition from a colonial to a post colonial state aspects of the urban landscape such as city plans and urban design initiatives take on particular significance. This series looks at the invisible social, cultural and geographical architectures we inhabit, in particular the urban, suburban and natural environments where colonial erasure and national mythologies have failed to turn space into place as Australia remains both ‘unsettling and unsettled’. The colonising representations of the immured family home and its intrusion and consumption of the natural environment is at the core of Handgun BBQ.

Handgun BBQ 

Mixed Business 2 is Pari’s second rendition of our annual show dedicated to our gallery keepers, facilitators, artists, and directors, who help run and sustain this space of multiplicity and exchange. Pari invokes the theme of the eclectic ‘mixed business’ as our mode of operation. Mixed businesses can be found scattered across Western Sydney and its surrounding suburbs. The corner-stores that seem at-once everywhere yet nowhere; either occupied and bustling, or abandoned and deteriorating. Those seemingly disparate yet familiar, accessible, and welcoming places that tend to our conveniences to serve our community.

Pari

Mixed Business 2

Sarah Cottier Gallery

Olsen Gallery

Recent works

Linger. linger. A word that implies by its very definition, an elongation of time; of waiting; of staying; of existing in a space of contemplation. Yet a word we don’t necessarily feel comfortable spending a lot of time with. The act of lingering from moment to moment or between two moments enables the opening and expansion of space, a home for betweenness. The natural inclination to want answers, to define, to move quickly towards exactitude is relinquished during times of lingering. It is within this space of uncertainty, of uncomfortable tension that we reside in Tom Polo’s exhibition of new paintings, linger, at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Linger

Dean Brown at Clayton Utz

Jasper Knight’s latest exhibition Posters is a series of works that situate around the iconic commercial multiples of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. These wildly recognisable posters depicting Parisian nightlife in the late 19th century endure as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan risqué Paris that still inspires tourism from across the globe. These images have been with Knight from a young age. His childhood bedroom was adorned with one of the Lautrec posters Divan Japonais alongside poster works by late Sydney artist Martin Sharp.

Posters

Deep into the night, I imagine waking in a dream state. Wandering through the house, objects glow from dark corners. Beyond the front door, alongside the streets, rose bushes are incandescent; the playground is empty and animated. This is the kind of journey my imagination meanders through when experiencing the work of Claudia Greathead. A clock tower, moths, mysterious cabinets, a small dog crop up and reappear. With these Greathead creates her own symbolic language. She refers to them as anchors. Anchors that provide softness and strength.

Affecting Clock Tower

The Way We Eat brings together works of art related to food – that ancient source of inspiration, pleasure and anxiety. It considers what we eat; how food is made, stored and consumed; the evolution of culinary wares; cultural exchange; and the ritual and symbolic meanings associated with food.

Jason Phu in 'The Way We Eat'

Staged concurrently at three of Sydney’s premiere cultural institutions – Carriageworks, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art – The National 2021: New Australian Art presents 39 emerging, mid-career and established Australian artists, collectives and collaboratives working in a diverse range of media across the country and overseas.The exhibition at Carriageworks, curated by Abigail Moncrieff, presents 13 artist projects that place an emphasis on collaboration, kinship and sociality, with artists navigating the measure and texture of our actions and engagement with the world around us.

Carriageworks

The National 2021: New Australian Art 

‘Textbook for Desire’ is an exhibition of newly-commissioned video works and installations, as well as a series of live, expanded ‘lectures’ that include music, dance and performance. The exhibition reflects how normative forms of desire are revised or struck through, making space for alternative and marginalised ways of thinking, being and desiring.

Cement Fondu

Textbook for Desire

Philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have argued that ‘truth’ and ‘art’ are deeply interconnected and not mutually exclusive. German philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to the ‘thingness of artworks’, or the ‘Being of artworks’ – ‘“Being” is the vague and elusive background familiarity we have that enables us to skilfully deal with particular beings’. Raftopoulos’ PERFECT NON PERFECT powerfully enacts Heidegger’s understanding as a means of intertwining ‘truth’ and ‘art’ – or more correctly, personal truth through art.

Perfect Non Perfect 

Amid dim lighting and muted tones, Oh, Museum turns a spotlight on the sombre grandiosity, assumed authority and monolithic narratives traditionally upheld by Western museums and art institutions.Presenting international and Australian artists, the show features a wide range of art forms and perspectives that variously dismantle and critique museological conventions and invisible systems of power. The nuances of the artists’ individual practices, along with the collective drive to undo and reconfigure, invites a crucial revisioning that is politically urgent, poetic and promising of new possibilities.

Oh, Museum

Pollen is used for transferring DNA; it carries the memory of its previous form. In the past, there was a predictability to the seasons but as the world shifts, unexpected forms develop in response. In this exhibition, the artists speculate on personal and cultural histories, from local sonic subcultures to temporary infrastructure to global drift. Pollen is an exercise in the collective imagining of alternate worlds that could germinate from this current time and place.

Pari 

Pollen

The Dobell Drawing Prize is an unparalleled celebration of drawing technique and innovation. Presented by the National Art School in partnership with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, the biennial prize explores the enduring importance of drawing within contemporary art practice. The 2021 exhibition showcases work by 64 finalists from around the country, demonstrating the vitality and scope of current Australian drawing.

NAS Gallery

Dobell Drawing Prize #22

The National Art School is proud to present John Olsen: Goya’s Dog, a powerful exploration of an extraordinary Australian artist – from his creative awakening in Spain, through the darkness that threatened to overwhelm him at times, and his ability to reach for the light, pursuing a long and acclaimed career.

Goya's Dog

Gallery 9 is proud to present Making It All Seem Real, Grace Wright's second solo exhibition at Gallery9. Essay by Briony DownesWhen looking at Grace Wright’s paintings, it is difficult not to feel swept up in their visually symphonic energy. Painted onto flat backgrounds of contrasting hues, great swathes of colour and line weave together across her surfaces like a flock of birds riding undulating wind currents.

Gallery 9

Making it all seem right

Con la punta de los dedos (With the tips of your fingers)

In Uncertain Times conjures a situation where systems and structures once familiar are thrown into in a state of flux. While uncertainty is a constant throughout our lived experience in its current form it has caused us to reconsider our relationship between private and social space. The work developed for this exhibition explores how familiar and dissimilar perceptions of space might coexist to reform and create new meanings as old conventions are reframed and questioned Susan Andrews has exhibited her work in commercial galleries and artist run spaces for over 25 years. Her work has been exhibited in major curatorial exhibitions and art prizes. Andrews is a Lecturer in Painting at the National Art School Sydney.

Stacks Projects

Construction / reconstruction: In Uncertain Times

Savour Labour is a new, multi-perspectival spatial environment or Hebi-tat by the collective known as The Arthitects. Comprising artist Gary Carsley and architect Renjie Teoh The Arthitects was initialised as an open forum in which individuals can come together to contest unsustainable hierarchies of power across the domains of art and architecture, capital and life. Savour Labour, their second Hebi-tat, developed around selected objects from the unique Trades Hall collection in Sydney and frames a collection of organised labour’s ritual and ceremonial artefacts specific to the late nineteenth century Trades Hall and its current and former occupants.

Cross Art

Savour Labour

Abridge explores how one can think about images of a past in an uncertain present. This project began as a series of encounters with people who migrated from Southern China to Hong Kong in the 1960s-2000s, building on the artist’s earlier project The Other Shore. But as Tay faced the dilemma of what and how to photograph, depict or record in the present, she began to revisit the corpus of images she had made while living in Hong Kong as a professional photographer for over sixteen years from 1999.

Verge Gallery

"ABRIDGE"

The project paired 24 visual arts students with an academic undertaking research at one of the University’s seven academic Colleges: Arts and Social Sciences; Asia and the Pacific; Business and Economics; Engineering and Computer Science; Health and Medicine; Law; and Science.

Ambush Gallery

Insight Out

Jerico Contemporary is delighted to present ‘Precious Metals’, a group show of works curated from our stockroom featuring Australian artists Luke Chiswell, Roman Longginou, Paige Northwood, and Holly Ryan. The exhibition will open on Tuesday 20th April and continue through to Tuesday 4th May 2021. Bringing together a selection of artworks that speak to distinct and imaginative uses of metals, ‘Precious Metals’ allows for an opportunity to view works in person that have previously only been able to view digitally or were exhibited under the restrictions of 2020. United through their elemental and raw materiality, each work captures the universal intrigue precious metals have long evoked.

Precious Metals

In partnership with Art Incubator, we look forward to our upcoming solo exhibition with Australian artist Tom Keukenmeester. Marking the first exhibition of Art Incubator's 2021 program and our inaugural collaboration with the initiative, the exhibition will open on Thursday 13th May and continue through to Saturday 5th June 2021.Keukenmeester is an emerging Australian artist working in both traditional oil painting and ceramic sculpture. The artist explores cohesive narratives between these two mediums, drawing out their potential through 2D and 3D perspectives.

Tom Keukenmeester

We are delighted to announce an indomitable collaboration between two of the most recognisable, quintessential Australian talents – LEIF – quality self-care and wellbeing products made from native ingredients, and BEC SMITH – sought after artist known for her interpretation of perception and meaning through shape, texture and colour, represented by Saint Cloche.

SAINT CLOCHE

TERRAIN

We are so happy to welcome back accomplished Australian artist, Ochre Lawson. After many solo exhibitions, including one at Saint Cloche last year, we are excited to reveal ‘Mungo to Mutawintji – Interior Habitat’.This new body of work is a definitive reflection of this artist’s appreciation and love of Australia’s magnificent, unique landscape. Ochre manages to capture the harsh yet beautiful isolation of the outback in bold form and muted, earthy, colourful lines. There’s a richness and vibrancy to this work that truly condenses and communicates the spirit of the outback with a contemporary perspective.

MUNGO TO MUTAWINTJI

Following on from an extraordinary year, Saint Cloche is delighted to welcome back Victorian artist, Stacey Rees and reveal ‘Golden Hour’.‘Golden Hour’ is the first hour after sunrise and the last hour of light before sunset that produces a warm natural light. Also known as ‘Magic Hour’ and ‘Twilight’, it is a universally loved time of day, when the sun is so low and is starting to slip away, the light is guiding, creating long and soft shadows giving dimension, its intensity is gently diffused through the atmosphere, offering that consummate magical illumination on all subjects.Bathing the landscape in rich, iridescent hues as it descends over the horizon, for artists and photographers, Golden Hour often becomes the hour: the time and opportunity to create divine elysian imagery, an immaculate portrait, the hour to rely on for its consistency and lucid beauty.

GOLDEN HOUR

This April, we are delighted to welcome back Sydney-based artist Luciana Smith.Drawing from her own observations and a range of pop culture and hyper-connected references, Luciana twists her subjects into a fictional world that exists between the real and imagined. Her colourful scenes create a fresh and idiosyncratic narrative for human behaviour in a variety of environments and situations. Through painting she reimagines, and brings into sharp focus, the humour, (sometimes bordering on absurdity), of day-to-day, modern life.Her work is an assemblage of snapshots that re-contextualise their subjects by connecting candid, fleeting gestures with found imagery. Luciana resurrects what she observes with intrepid use of colour and a sassy, self-assuredness.‘Hand in Hand’ is an interesting tongue-in-cheek take on motivational direction, the rich complexity of life and the things that may engage or repel.

HAND IN HAND

Pilgrimage

Each sculpture is displayed in its own tray of water and viewers are encouraged to take their own photos and reinterpret the gallery space through the same process, becoming active participants in reimagining the landscapes around them.‍Lookup by looking down.A moment of solitary introspection suddenly brings a vision of your surroundings.From the gutter, a theatre is born.Each player with their own convictions, their own reading of the spectacle:‘The city is…’You are caught in a whirlwind of stories: theirs and yours.‘The street is…’Every thing is already framed, sorted into what it is and is not.‘The buildings are…’You walk around and the structures move as the wind bends and ripples steel.It is ephemeral. Re-read, re-envisioned, re-related.

Gaffa

RE-INFLECTION

“Unfolding” not only refers to the physical book but also to the many layers of meaning within. There is mystery in a closed book which is gradually revealed in the viewing. An artists’ book is a journey of discovery for the maker and the viewer.Megan Edwards and Trish Yates have gone on that journey.There has been an unfolding of ideas, expression and responses to the world around them articulated in a book format.Relief and Intaglio printmaking techniques are used by both to express their ideas.The themes that Trish employs revolve strongly around landscape and the natural environment inspired in particular by her love of Sydney’s local bushland and her travels around Australia.

UNFOLDING

I believe that dreams many times arise from our internal struggles between unconscious desires and our efforts to curb them. There are so interesting, like a connecting cord with the unconscious. 60 Dreams presents my dream experiences in different colours and shades. As much as I remember when I was young, whenever I was with myself for a few minutes, I used to dream of being a different person who lives in a place where there are a lot of trees and I have a family free of fear. Psychological understanding says that dreams contain the impulses, desires and aspirations that a person seeks. I have felt a close connection with nature, and I started to paint landscapes and natural life forms in 2018. The project is a blend of human experience, nature and flow of emotions that connect with the unconscious. My paintings are best left to be explored, as different audience might be able to find their own connection and perception with my work.

DREAMS, FACES AND LINES

The premise of this exhibition is to showcase a selection of artwork made during/or in response to the lockdown period. Our aim is to exhibit a range of works from different mediums and skill sets that give a glimpse into the creative lives of artists during this time.

LOCKDOWN SHOWDOWN

“The lines I create are inspired by the flow of energy that is found in complete presence, where dialogue between stillness and movement exists as subtle vibration”. Each stroke is a breath into a new dimension, formed precisely through repetition and the mastering of her innate, instinctual play. Intrigued by the tension of shadow and light, each composition unravels a new layer uncovering stories within her past. Angela expresses herself through pure psychic automatism, a technique coined by the Surrealists to describe the performance of the subconscious mind onto paper. Angela Tam’s ‘Unidentified Terrain’ seeks to express the underlying conversations between the physical and spiritual and the empowering rise of the inner child surrendering to the Unknown.

UNIDENTIFIED TERRAIN

Artist BioPhresh Blood is the brainchild of artist Jordan Davies, a professional emergency nurse and self-taught artist. Formerly from the Central West, Dubbo NSW, he is now based on the beautiful Northern Beaches of Sydney where he produces his works. Phresh Blood takes inspiration from the human body in a psychedelic and surreal fashion. His signature style is the chaos of acrylic pouring layered with a hand drawn digital artwork.

WITHIN THE FAÇADE

Spanning over 25 years of serialisation, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is considered vital text in the era of modern anime, with Araki’s work rallying a dedicated fanbase due to its iterative storytelling techniques, unabashed personality, unique aesthetic and its extremely unconventional stances on queerness, gender and representation within the shounen genre.In JoJofinity artists working across a variety of print, audio-visual, and sculptural mediums create pieces that respond to challenges and questions raised by the text and reflect on its impact inwards. The show brings forth avenues of investigation previously unseen within fan art — whether that be an investigation into kitsch aesthetics as a veil for societal violence — the inherent conflict of visuals and ideals in performative masculinity — or the thin line in fashion that delineates the campy and the glamourous.JoJofinity is a love letter by a community that ultimately still faces discrimination in the art world as being deemed unintellectual and overly referential. With this show, we provide onlookers a chance to peek into not only the products of fan artists, but also understand their motivations in creating transformative work that not only embraces its source material but allows it to transcend it into a hopefully recognisable and legitimate art making framework. Thus, providing critique, insight, references, fervour and passion into pieces of pop culture that enter public perception.

JOJOFINITY : A JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE FAN ART SHOW’

Metamour is “someone who is your partner’s partner, but with whom you have no romantic relationship. This can be your partner’s other boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse.” Metamours is a multi-disciplinary group show consisting of 7 artists, co-curated by emerging creators Danni Paradiso and Hannah Dockrill. Each contributor will explore this challenging concept through different mediums, including print making, graphic design, photography, performance and installation. Metamours is inspired by the rising popularity of non-conventional relationships and how we navigate the platonic relationships outside of the romantic. Often non-monogamy and open relationships can be met with hostility and accusatory language, slut-shaming and immorality. Additionally, when explored in media, we often only encounter representations of the experiences people have with their multiple romantic significant others. There is little/vague insight into the relationships between Metamours, even those friends and family outside of the romantic that observe. This exhibition aims to open a discussion on how we navigate non-conventional relationships, without the fear of being ridiculed. Whilst surrounded by art that unapologetically discusses the bountiful ways we can love, the audience is encouraged to self-reflect on romantic relationships.

METAMOURS

The walking art of this exhibition is a selection of my explorations and responses to these questions.I am intrigued by the artistic, sensory, speculative and critical potential the physical activity of walking brings to art. My walks are artistic and political acts that resist the speed, spectacle and consumption of contemporary society. I walk on roads, footpaths, and designated walking tracks. I walk as a form of transportation, pleasure and as an artist.Often these paths and intentions blur. The Walking Art of this exhibition includes my local, urban walks and longer, durational walks in suburban and regional areas.I use a variety of media to create my Walking Art for exhibition purposes. Walking with Intent is a way of sharing the complex interactions of my pedestrian experiences with others and, perhaps, inspire them to walk.I acknowledge and pay my respects to the TraditionalOwners and Custodians of the lands on which I walk, on which I trespass.

Walking with Intent

Artist BioEnsor is a Sydney based artist. His work combinesillustration, watercolour and acrylics on paper to create a unique style withits own visual language of reoccurring themes and imagery. This will be his36th solo exhibition.

Happily Ever Afterthoughts

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of new work by Hany Armanious.The exhibition comprises a new body of small-scale sculptures.Hany Armanious lives and works in Sydney. Over thirty years his work has been presented in solo and curated exhibitions throughout Australasia, in Europe and North America. His work represented Australia at the 54th Venice Biennale.This is Hany Armanious’ first solo exhibition with Fine Arts, Sydney.

Fine Arts, Sydney

Hany Armanious

Following from the powerful 2019 exhibition River on the Brink: inside the Murray-Darling Basin, curator Gavin Wilson brings another thought provoking exhibition to the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Tree of Life.As we cautiously emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, humanity is faced with a stark reckoning. The concept for Tree of life is the central motif that signifies the challenges we face. What remains of the natural world is the one beacon in a perilous age of drought, fire, floods and plague, exacerbated by the constant reality of climate change. The recent horrific fire season experienced across the country will go down as the greatest extinction event for Australian wildlife and habitats since Colonisation.To temper an already dangerous over reaction to the vexed issues of hazard reduction, tree thinning and further rampant land clearing, this major exhibition led by First Nations artists will generate a fresh, positive energy towards the reclamation of diminishing natural resources. Threads woven through Tree of life will recognise the deep spiritual and physical associations that connect all forms of life.Life that must be nurtured as we chart a course of action through this perilous age of climate change, pandemics and wildfires.Exhibiting artists include – from the APY Lands, Adelaide Studio Women’s Collective Josephine Mick, Rhoda Tjitayi, Katie Curley, Barbara Baker, Margot Brown, Inawintji Williamson and Margaret Richards – together with Allana Beltran, Rob Blakers, GW Bot, Nicholas Blowers, Nici Cumpston, Tamara Dean, Rachel Ellis, Louise Fowler-Smith, Richard Goodwin, Nicholas Harding, Janet Laurence, Idris Murphy, Andrew Merry, Euan Macleod, Mathew Newton, Peggy Patrick. William Robinson, Shane Smithers, Mary Tonkin, Emma Walker, John R. Walker and Joshua Yeldham.Curated by Gavin Wilson

S.H. ERVIN GALLERY

Tree of Life: a testament to endurance

The alternative Archibald and Wynne Prize selectionThe Salon des Refusés was initiated by the S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1992 in response to the large number of works entered into the Archibald Prize which were not selected for display in the official exhibition. The Archibald Prize is one of Australia’s most high profile and respected awards which attracts hundreds of entries each year and the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s ‘alternative’ selection has become a much anticipated feature of the Sydney scene.Each year our panel is invited to go behind the scenes of the judging process for the annual Archibald Prize for portraiture and Wynne Prize for landscape painting and figure sculpture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to select an exhibition from the many hundreds of works entered in both prizes but not chosen for the official award exhibition.The Salon des Refusés exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery has established an excellent reputation that rivals the selections in the ‘official’ exhibition, with works selected for quality, diversity, humour and experimentation, and which examine contemporary art practices, different approaches to portraiture and responses to the landscape.The Holding Redlich People’s Choice Award is valued at $3000.

Salon des Refusés 2021

Artist Luke Sciberras was born in Sydney in 1975. He attended the National Art School in Sydney from 1995 to 1997.Since the 1990’s to date, Sciberras has held more than 40 solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and numerous regional galleries. Regional group exhibitions include Jamberoo Mountain Road at Shoalhaven Regional Art Gallery, River on the Brink: Inside the Murray-Darling Basin at S.H. Ervin Gallery Sydney and Salient; 100 Years on (an exhibition commemorating the centenary of Great War).Sciberras has also been a finalist in the Hadley’s Art Prize, and the Kedumba Drawing Award, as well as the Wynne Prize, and the Tattersalls Landscape Prize on multiple occasions.Luke’s work is represented in a number of collections including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Parliament House Collection Canberra, the ANZAC Memorial Sydney, the Union Club Sydney, Macquarie Bank and regional gallery collections including Shoalhaven, Bathurst, Orange, Port Macquarie, Broken Hill, Penrith and Newcastle.‘To make an impression, a gesture or a glimpse of a memory is one of our most universal and natural instincts. The impulse to tell a story or more strongly, to share is the urge to embed a place or circumstance with the human condition. Painting and drawing is to me, the very essence of all these expressions. Perennially, I travel around and into Australian landscapes to visit and revisit people and places which hold for me a resonance and compelling painterly allure.Invariably I have worked alongside people who occupy and understand these places best. The indigenous peoples of the central desert, Arrernte, the Walpiri in the Tanami, Wanambaal Wunguur on the Kimberley coast, Kamilaroi at Moree and the Barkindji of Wilcannia all illuminate my experience profoundly and I warm to their friendship and generosity.In the same spirit I have learned a great deal and enjoyed long friendships with graziers, environmentalists and other non indigenous custodians who have opened their doors and gates to allow me to form intimate and sustained acquaintances with some of Australia’s most staggering beauties. This is the reason that deeply feel that an artist doesn’t go out to the landscape but into it.These wonderful chapters in my life and the subsequent time spent in the studio come to form a series of bodies of work which enduringly reward me as much as they spur me on to the next.’Luke Sciberras, 2020

King Street Gallery

Close to Home

Abstractionist John Turier was born in Sydney, in 1954. He graduated from the Hunter Institute of Higher Education, NSW, in 1968 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, and then again from the University of Newcastle in 1989, with a Diploma in Painting. He completed a Master’s Degree in fine art at the University of Newcastle in 1990. He currently lives and works in Newcastle, NSW.John Turier’s 30-year career is underpinned by 16 solo exhibitions since 1989. Additionally, Turier’s experience as a tradesman contributed immensely to his ability to adapt illustrations into three-dimensional forms, a process which underpins his more often than not humorous sculpture.Turier won the William Fletcher Trust Scholarship in 1990. He has also received numerous public sculpture commissions from namely, Australian Geographic, Newcastle City Council, Eden Gardens, Sydney, PCYC Australia and Commonwealth Bank.His work can be found in a number of corporate and public collections such as Artbank, Jackson Smith Solicitors, Commonwealth Bank, SANs Hospital in Wahroonga Sydney and Newcastle City Council as well as Newcastle Regional Gallery.A dual-retrospective exhibition of John Turier and partner Nicola Hensel is currently on display at Maitland Regional Art Gallery: Kalliope Calliope. This edition of Meet an Artist November 2019, and will conclude February 16, 2020.King Street Gallery has represented John since 2002.Right: Image supplied courtesy of artist 2020.

Wax Crown

Idris Murphy is a contemporary figurative landscape painter born in 1949, Sydney. Murphy graduated from National Art School with a diploma in Painting in 1971. He then became the institution’s Head of Drawing in 1997.Idris completed a Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in NSW and a Graduate Diploma (Education), SCAE, Sydney whilst he was a lecturer at the College of Fine Art at UNSW from 1988 – 2007. In 1982, Murphy was a lecturer at the University of Wollongong, NSW, and was instrumental in establishing the printmaking department of newly founded School of Creative Arts.From 1976 – 1977, Idris completed his Postgraduate studies in painting &amp; printmaking, at Winchester College of Art, in the UK. To date, Murphy has had 40 solo exhibitions across Australia and internationally. Idris’ survey show I &amp; Thou: Survey Exhibition 1986-2008, exhibited at King Street Gallery in Sydney, Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery and Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery NSW. Idris has been represented by King Street Gallery since 1993.Intrinsic to Murphy’s artmaking process is an engagement with the environment which surrounds him, and by extension, his en Plein air practice. Murphy explains that his ‘expeditions’ through the Australian bush ‘offer him enough to last a lifetime’. (Catalogue Essay, 2017, Gregor Sloss) His work aims to ‘transform an already imagined landscape’ (Sloss, 2017). Murphy’s practice attempts to mirror Indigenous respect for the Australian landscape, in its value. Murphy suggests that an indigenous Australian landscape painting is a reinvigoration of the landscape and is sustained by the Dreaming’s.Murphy’s work can be found in a number of public, state and corporate collections such as the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Art Gallery NSW, State Library NSW, Artbank, Allens Collection, and the Westpac Collection.Idris’ studio is located in Kurnell, Sydney.

The Abundance

Brisbane born, 1963, artist Amanda Penrose Hart is predominantly a plein air landscape painter. Penrose Hart graduated from Queensland College of Art in 1983 with a Diploma of Fine Art, and then again from Griffith University in 1991, with a Bachelor of Visual Arts.Penrose Hart has featured in numerous selective group exhibitions, often following artist trip’s or artist-run projects such as Your Friend the Enemy, Gallipoli and Salient The Western Front ,(both commemorative exhibitions of the Great War), Amanda also travels regularly to Wilcannia, Broken Hill and New Zealand . She was part of an exhibition at SH Ervin Gallery called River on the Brink: Inside the Murray Darling Basin, which aimed to raise awareness for the impacts of drought and climate change in Australia.Amanda recently won the Gallipoli Art Prize in 2017 and the Clayton Utz Award in 2019. Amanda has also been a finalist in the Tattersalls Landscape Prize, King’s School Art Prize, The Ravenswood Art Prize, the Salon des Refusés and NSW Parliament en Plein air, as well as the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Muswellbrook Art Prize, and the Kilgour Art Prize.Her paintings are held in collections of the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Australia Cub, both Sydney and Melbourne, the Australian National University, Macquarie Bank, Parliament House, Canberra, the NSW Bar Association and numerous regional galleries across Australia.King Street Gallery has represented Amanda since 2003. She lives and works between Sofala and Sydney.

The long view

New work

Paintings

Liverpool Street Gallery is proud to announce Kevin Connor's Passing By, an exhibition of major paintings and rare &amp; unseen recent works. Kevin's describes his work has a type of "intuitive-ism", whereby the figures, locations and visions are felt rather than seen. In fact, it is the locations and subjects that close to the artist's heart; Stanley street in Darlinghurst, Cafe's in Melbourne and the people that inhabit them.

Liverpool Street Gallery

Passing By

Capture’ is the first comprehensive survey of Australian artist and filmmaker Sam Smith. It brings together four moving image projects from the past decade alongside a major new commission that explores relationships between geology, technology and environment.

UNSW GALLERIES

Capture

Saplings are not stagnant. By their very definition, saplings are dynamic — growing, branching out and forming connections. It’s a fitting title, really. It allows the encompassment of everything that this exhibition lends itself to; acting as a springboard to explore ideas relating to the Anthropocene, natural and social history, biology, ecology, climate change, memory, innocence, and birth and death.Many of the artists mentioned the strange parallels that were drawn between their lives and the concept of saplings in the lead up to this exhibition. It’s not surprising, as all five artists; Rebecca Selleck, Tamara Mar- rington, Catriona Secker, Chrystal Rimmer and Anna May Kirk; deal with notions relating to the natural world in some way or another, and artists are, by nature, contextually responsive.

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March 2026

April 2026

May 2026

June 2026

July 2026

Exhibitions

Exhibitions

Tuesday 30 June
2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Saturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Saturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch Gallery
Thursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July

Back to Calendar

Exhibitions

Tuesday 30 June
2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Saturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Saturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch Gallery
Thursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July

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ArtCal by studiomass.com.au

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

March 2026

April 2026

May 2026

June 2026

July 2026

Exhibitions

Exhibitions

Tuesday 30 June2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian ArtSaturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South WalesSaturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch GalleryThursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July

Back to Calendar

Exhibitions

Tuesday 30 June2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian ArtSaturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South WalesSaturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch GalleryThursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July

Menu

Menu

ArtCal by studiomass.com.au

Tuesday 30 June
2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Saturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Saturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch Gallery
Thursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July

Tuesday 30 June
2026

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Saturday 27 September – Sunday 26 July

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Saturday 31 May – Sunday 9 August

Dominik Mersch Gallery
Thursday 11 June – Saturday 4 July