Review: Sydney Contemporary 2025
Words and pics by Ella Hailey.
I was lucky enough to visit Sydney Contemporary a little early this year at Carriageworks, and it was nothing short of a sensory overload, in the best possible way.
Over one hundred and ten galleries, more than five hundred artists, and a sprawling mix of installations, performances, talks, workshops, and interactive works. As a first-timer, I felt like a guppy in a vast art ocean - surrounded by conversation, connection, and creative energy.
Art is an obscure and powerful thing that we’ve all come to appreciate. It can deliver deeply urgent ideas or offer light, playful moments, sometimes both at once. It confronts, surprises, confuses - and that’s exactly why we need it. Art allows for ambiguity and reflection. It helps us see differently, think more openly, and stretch beyond our own experience.
You don’t have to “get it” all (I definitely didn’t). Sometimes, just showing up, feeling something - even discomfort, is more than enough. So when the opportunity comes, go. Here’s a roundup of the artists and works that stayed with me long after I left.
Helen Calder
Stacks, 2025 Presented by Two Rooms
Calder blurs the line between painting and sculpture with her vibrant, three-dimensional works made from “paint skins” - poured, pigmented layers of paint freed from traditional stretchers, then folded, draped, and layered over everyday objects. Her practice lives in the in-between, asking the question: Where does painting end and sculpture begin?
In her Stacks series, these fluid skins are arranged atop stools and other familiar supports, exploring ideas of balance, tension, and the relationship between structure and form. The work invites a tactile engagement with paint itself. Its weight, texture, and colour. Offering a playful yet precise meditation on materiality.
Peata Larkin
Kei konei koe_You are here
PAULNACHE
This piece really stayed with me. Rooted in Māori weaving traditions and spiritual cosmology, Peata Larkin (Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) creates luminous silk and paint installations that pulse with repetition and rhythm. The works evoke tukutuku panels and gridded codes - conveying visual languages of memory, lineage, and knowledge.
What struck me most was how the threads, both literal and symbolic, become maps: connecting past and present, land and lineage, spirituality and structure. There’s something universally grounding in that. Even if you don’t share Larkin’s cultural background, the work invites you to reflect on your own. On where you come from, who you’re connected to, and how your personal history is woven into who you are today.
Kei konei koe ("You are here") feels like a gentle yet powerful reminder: we all exist in a web of relationships - familial, ancestral, emotional…and Larkin captures that beautifully. Her blending of sacred tradition with contemporary materials creates a space where anyone can find resonance, whether through memory, identity, or the quiet act of being present.
It’s a work that doesn’t ask for understanding through intellect; it asks for feeling. And in that, there’s something for everyone.
Mechelle Bounpraseuth
Chalk Horse Gallery
Sydney-based artist Mechelle Bounpraseuth works across ceramics, drawing, and video, using her practice to explore cultural loss, inherited trauma, and the quiet rituals of care that shape migrant family life.
At first glance, her works are playful. Glazed ceramic fruits stacked in accompanying crates, bursting with bold, saturated colour. But beneath the surface is something much heavier. These familiar domestic objects aren’t just still lifes, they’re emotional artefacts. Each one becomes a vessel for memory, grief, and resilience.
There’s something powerful in how these fragile, handmade forms speak to the weight of what we carry. They hold emotion the way ceramics hold form. Delicate yet enduring. Easily shattered, yet made to last.
Bounpraseuth captures the poetry in the everyday: the small, often invisible gestures of care that bind generations. She reminds us that love doesn’t always announce itself; it often shows up in quiet moments, in routine, in objects passed from hand to hand.
Sally Smart
Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert
A major figure in Australian contemporary art, Sally Smart is known for her large-scale assemblages made from felt, canvas, and screen-printed fabric, grounded in identity politics and feminist history. I was struck by how her collaged forms, seemingly disparate, came together with such cohesion, creating new shapes, narratives, and meaning.
Her recent exhibitions, including Flaubert’s Puppets and The Artist’s Ballet, delve into the legacy of modernist women artists, using cutting, layering, and performance as both method and metaphor. Smart’s work doesn’t just reference history - it reconstructs it, placing women’s creative labour at the centre of the story.
Zac Langdon-Pole
A striking and cerebral body of work, Zac Langdon-Pole’s Entity Studies is anything but naive despite its jigsaw-puzzle foundation. Presented by STATION, this solo exhibition by the New Zealand artist pushes the boundaries of visual perception, memory, and cultural mythology.
In this series, Langdon-Pole fits pieces from entirely different puzzles together with uncanny precision, creating poetic, unsettling collages that span abstraction and figuration. Each work is haunted by a third, unseen image, a "ghost stencil" that lingers behind the surface, prompting us to trace the moment when one image becomes another.
Drawing on cognitive science, Langdon-Pole explores how we "fill in" gaps based on our own or collective past experiences. The sources he combines are vast and varied: NASA space telescope imagery, 19th-century colonial landscapes, mythological paintings, marbled bookends, and fables. Through these layered, unexpected connections, he unravels the ways in which cultural myths and visual codes continue to shape our understanding of the world. You could truly stare at these pieces for hours and uncover more layers at each glance. Captivating stuff.
What makes these works so compelling is their tension. Between what is seen and what is suggested, between what fits and what doesn’t quite… Inviting us to look a little longer, and to question the stories we think we already know.
Benjamin Barretto
Animal House Fine Arts
Barretto’s diptychs feature oil paint that is manipulated directly between two canvases, transferring pigment through repeated, almost meditative gestures, split by razor-thin neon lines, vibrating with a quiet intensity.
What remains on the surface is a record of time, pressure, and movement. Each mark is a trace of contact. These pieces hum and shift as light moves across them. This procedural approach sits at the core of Barretto’s broader practice, often drawing from experimental music - looping, feedback, phasing. Using these as conceptual frameworks to challenge and dissolve material boundaries. The result is work that lives in the liminal zone: between image and object, improvisation and control.
Julie Rrap
ARC ONE Gallery
A feminist icon in Australian art since the 1970s, Julie Rrap has consistently challenged the way we see and understand the body, particularly the female body. Through photography, sculpture, and performance.
Seeing her work in the flesh (pun may or may not be intended) was a powerful moment for me as a long-time admirer; there’s something visceral about the way she uses her own image as raw material, reshaping and reinterpreting it across different mediums.
One of her most iconic works, Overstepping (2001), features an image of her feet transformed, sprouting stiletto-like heels. Unsettling and darkly humorous, the piece critiques the impossible beauty standards imposed on women, which have only intensified in recent years due to increased digital manipulation.
Her influence on Australian contemporary art is monumental, not only for the boldness of her visual language, but for the way she’s carved out space for women’s bodies to be seen on their own terms. Unidealised, uncontained, and unapologetically present.
Julia Ciccarone
Niagara Galleries
Known for hyper-detailed, cinematic paintings that blur dream and reality. Her narrative-driven works often feature solitary figures in uncanny settings, influenced by film and personal memory. A frequent finalist in major portrait and painting prizes, Ciccarone’s world feels both familiar and fantastical.
Julia Morison
Jonathan Smart Gallery | Emily Gardener Projects
This really caught my eye. Julia Morison’s Arcana is a striking, immersive installation featuring 23 bronze sculptures that bring the Major Arcana of the tarot to life. Poised and powerful, each figure is rich with symbolism, both beautiful and slightly unnerving.
Staged in a dramatically lit booth designed in collaboration with Knight Associates, the space invites visitors into a quiet, otherworldly experience. Live tarot readings take place throughout the fair, offering a personal and introspective layer to the work.
The installation coincides with the launch of the second edition of Morison’s Four Worlds Tarot deck, which is also available to purchase. Something about the whole experience felt both timeless and transportive. Part sculpture, part ritual, and part memory.
Shen Shaomin
Mechanical Carp Installation
This work completely caught me off guard, in the best way. Taking up an entire corner, Shen Shaomin’s eerie installation features two thousand robotic carp flailing across a salt flat. With mechanical breath and ghostly movement, the fish straddle the line between simulation and life, unsettling yet mesmerizing.
At first glance, it feels surreal, even playful. But the deeper you look, the more unsettling it becomes. The work critiques cultural commodification, environmental degradation, and mass production. Traditionally, a symbol of resilience and good fortune in Chinese culture, the carp here becomes a fragile, synthetic shell. Sealed in industrial cans, suspended between preservation and extinction.
The ecological context adds another layer: introduced to Australian waterways as a food source, the carp quickly became a pest. In Shen’s hands, they become a metaphor for human disruption. How something revered can be transformed into something harmful.
Shen’s wider practice spans sculpture, installation, and performance, often blending biological material with technology to raise questions around science, power, and control. This piece lingers in your mind. Not just as a visual experience, but as a quiet warning. I will definitely be keeping my eye out for more works from him.
Bronwyn Hill
Flinders Lane Gallery
Hill’s hyperreal oil paintings are quiet, contemplative, and disarmingly surreal. One standout piece shows a woman sweeping a floor full of monarch butterflies, beautiful yet haunting. Her subjects are often women caught in still, introspective moments, rendered with such precision and softness that they feel suspended in time.
Hill explores the dichotomy between portraiture and still life, stripping away background noise and leaving only the essential: figure, gesture, light. Her minimalist compositions focus on figure, gesture, and light, amplifying emotion through isolation. The subjects, often women or symbolic objects, are suspended in light-filled space, evoking a dreamlike stillness.
Themes of self-reflection, domesticity, and personal autonomy recur throughout her practice. With a restrained palette and masterful use of shadow, Hill creates intimate yet universal images. Quiet mirrors in which we’re asked to consider solitude, pressure, and identity in a world that rarely allows space to pause.
Darcy Bella Arnold
A hyperreal citrus sculpture (The Orange is Orange, 2024). Bold, surreal, and slightly absurd in the best way.
Photo Sydney Highlight
There were also some fantastic photography highlights. Premiering this year is Photo Sydney. A new fair-within-a-fair that puts a sharp spotlight on contemporary photography. This dedicated space quickly became one of the must-see highlights.
A standout for me was George Byrne, who creates large-scale photographs that transform everyday surfaces and landscapes into painterly abstractions. Drawing on the crisp, vivid clarity of modernist painting. His images carry a visual language reminiscent of artists like David Hockney and Jeffrey Smart, blending precision with a subtle poetic quality.
It was also great to see some of my favourite photographs from Blender Gallery. Iconic images of Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, Bowie, and Patti Smith, just to name a few, were on display. Featuring legendary photographers such as Brian Duffy, Mick Rock, Jesse Frohman, and more, capturing timeless portraits of music icons.
A must-see for fans, collectors, and anyone passionate about the intersection of music and visual culture.
Whether you’re an art novice or seasoned critic, Sydney Contemporary is a whirlwind of inspiration. It's impossible to see everything—but what sticks with you says something about who you are. These were the works that made me stop, look twice, and stay a little longer.
