SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2025

Sydney Contemporary fell on a day when Melbourne’s rainy deluge found its way north. Beneath its constancy, Carriageworks emerged as a beacon, an anthology of beautiful things that beckoned like a siren within the roiling chaos of the sea.

On arrival, patrons dart beneath the glittering confetti shards of a powerful installation by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana. Inspired by traditional Māori gateways, the shimmering entrance sculpture, made from thousands of moving discs to form a cultural tribute and a dynamic welcome, blessed visitors as they raced for the fair’s shelter.

Inside, one of the first standout moments hit in the liminal space between Ben Quilty’s impasto strokes at Justin Miller Art and the striking exploration of family, lineage, and mythology that defines the work of Atong Atem at MARS Gallery. Mediating between the two, a salon hang of Miranda Hine’s gorgeous small-scale oil paintings became the first hint that this year, Sydney Contemporary’s offerings would become defined by the act of collecting, preserving, and assigning value to material culture.

Pulled by the gentle current of bodies, the next standout from afar was signalled by radiant sunshine hues haloing into Carriageworks' epic volumes. Represented by Aotearoa gallery Paulnache, Peata Larkin’s collection of acrylic on embroidered silk works titled Kei konei koe _You are here, reflected the strength of artistic evolution, cultural exchange, and craft—themes that continued throughout to become a constellation, activators of perception and expression.

Another highlight was the Futures booth by C.Gallery. Representing Nic Fern and Claudia Lau, it cultivated a beautiful balance between Nic’s language of rainbow weave sat beside two large ceramic wall sculptures by Claudia, tangibly forging a complementary and synchronic dialogue between poetic porcelain hosting the wabi-sabi beauty of 60 different glazes alongside the geometric precision of its composition, and kaleidoscopic textile expressions.

Ultimately, Sydney Contemporary 2025 raised the collective bar hugely. From a ceramic fruit stall foregrounding large-scale nostalgia strewn by Clara Adolphs in thick blue-green hues, to the perfect compositions of suspended glass, brass, steel, and mirror of Nick Mount’s wall hangings and mounds of mechanical dying fish, there wasn’t an opportunity lost, a moment not seized to leverage art as a way to shake ourselves of our biases and re-orient in a world irrevocably changing faster than ever before. Yang Yongliang’s backlit transparencies of mind-blowing metropolises felt like they might exist in a scarily not-too-distant future. Lindy Lee’s flung brass gave off an eerie AI-esque notion of animation, as if it would rearrange itself the moment you turned away. Julia Ciccarone’s paintings were like portals into a story not yet told, one anchored by history, recognisable like déjà vu. It is these notes, these gestures of something vital hanging in the balance—the texture of things yet to come—that marked Sydney Contemporary 2025 and left it indelibly scored upon the memory bank in a way only art can.

Find out more about Sydney Contemporary here. Words by Tiffany Jade.