Sydney Contemporary Art Fair 2022
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.M Contemporary is excited to present a dynamic group exhibition featuring a collection of emerging and established represented gallery artists.
View and acquire via the online preview catalogue below.
Make sure to secure your tickets via sydneycontemporary.com to attend.
Opening times:
Thursday | 11am – 9pm
Friday | 12pm – 9pm
Saturday | 11am – 6pm
Sunday | 11am – 5pm
Finnish born, Australian based artist Agneta Ekholm’s work is by definition abstract and built entirely from imagination and engagement with her technical process. Each painting evolves on the canvas: no working drawings exist. The paintings result from the exploration and discovery inherent in a technique honed over the last 20 years.
I am an Australian born, Sydney-based artist.
Cameron Haas began studying fine art at the University of Tasmania and completed his studies at the National Art School in Sydney where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 2010. He now lives and works in the Sydney Area.
Australian artist Diana Watson’s elegant still-life paintings have earned the Sydney-based artist great repute locally, and now it seems the rest of the world is catching on, with selected works set to appear on the silver screen, in Hollywood production Collateral Beauty, as well as in celebrity chef Rick Stein’s new restaurant in Marlborough, Wiltshire (UK). Watson has been honing her talent for more than 20 years, the joy she takes in her work evident in each brush stroke. Her paintings resonate with a sense of warmth, nostalgia, depth and intrigue – at once beguiling and comforting.
Galia Gluckman creates large-scale, multi-dimensional artworks through the layered use of hand-cut strips of paper. Born in 1973 in Tel Aviv, Gluckman initially studied and worked as a Fashion Designer in London and New York, before focusing solely on Fine Art from 2004. The intuitive process of cutting and pasting paper takes the viewer on an oscillating journey between order and disorder. Each strip of paper is painted, cut and attached, layer upon layer. Gluckman is mostly instinctively guided to form shapes and structures that build upon themselves to become new forms. Unveiling the intricacies, the viewer is invited to observe both minute details and majesty of scale. The artist has developed an intimate relationship with her material, working rhythmically with the meditative construction of each work. In a world increasingly driven by automation and syntheticism, Gluckman is intent on exploring and amplifying the human qualities that machines cannot replicate. It is the unveiling of the intricacies that create a sense of stillness and quiet that capture interest. The cutting and reassemblage of the artist’s material is reflective of the shifting binary perceptions of all things; we are creatures of balance and imbalance. Living requires us to construct, deconstruct and to then rebuild our existence constantly.
Hannalie Taute (b. 1977) started her life’s journey in a small town called Fochville in Gauteng, South Africa. In 2000, she obtained a National Higher Diploma in Fine Art at PE Technicon (now the NNMU). A decade ago she started working with rubber and particularly repurposed rubber inner-tubes, and in 2012 she added embroidery to her list of preferred media.
Through still life paintings of Indigenous flowers, birds, and insects, Guthleben uses the traditions of vanitas and its messages of the transience of life to present a painted vernacular that spans humour, kitsch, historical and environmental themes.
“I do what I do for the love of new experiences. My imagery is not bound by language or culture. I want my work to speak for itself and for people to interpret it in their own way. I want people to be affected by my images… As long as someone is feeling something, I am achieving my goals.”
Jarek Wojcik was born in Szczecin, Poland. He studied painting and art history at the University of Poznan, Poland, graduating with an MA in medieval mural art. He held his first solo in 2015 and has exhibited in galleries in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Paris, Perth, Szczecin and Sydney.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Lyndi Sales (b.1973) explores themes of perception and vision as well as connectivity. She strives to create in her audience a corporeal response – a feeling of being in one’s own body, to “bring people to their senses.”
Creating unordinary portraits of women, both representational and abstract, Lionel Smit sources his inspiration from the Cape Malay Community. Guided by influences of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol, he combines gestural brushstrokes, splattered and dripping paint, with patches of colour applied across the heads of his subjects. Smit’s sculptures invoke similar feelings to that of their two-dimensional counterparts, yet, a further addition of depth in its actuality, he imbues his pieces with less foreboding and melancholy. The opaque softness of the paintings is replaced with highly detailed hatching, clay protrusions, and grooved surfaces. The layers of intense colouring are reproduced as physically perceivable textures in this medium.
“I grew up in Wangi Wangi, on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Macquarie, NSW. My early life was insular and magical. I was brought up in a large creative family and attended a Steiner School. Creating art has always been a safe space for me.
Milminyina was born in 1960 at Wirrwawuy, near Yirrkala and Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula, at the very northeastern tip of the Northern Territory. She is the daughter of Gumatj woman Rrirraliny Yunupiŋu (a daughter of famous arist and political figure Mungurrawuy Yunupiŋu), and Gunguyuma Dhamarrandji, who was brought up by the legendary Djapu leader Woŋgu Munuŋgurr. Her märi, or mother’s mother’s clan, is Rirratjiŋu, the landowners of Yirrkala, who share many sacred designs with the Djambarrpuyŋu of this area. The Djambarrpuyŋu clan which she belongs to are mainly based in the Westerly end of the Yolŋu nation near a major sacred site at Buckingham Bay. This arm of the clan use the surname Guyula. A small cluster of the clan is based around a group of sacred sites at Yirrkala. These people are known by the surname Dhammarrandji. In the ancestral everywhen the spirit people of this place and the offshore islands in the form of terns conducted ceremony around the Merri or sacred string which was cut. The short string was given to the Rirratjiŋu and the longer to the Djambarrpuyŋu. Hence the Rirratjiŋu are sedentary here and the Djambarrpuyŋu range far to the West.
Michael Taylor mimics the immediate and expansive nature of the drawing process in order to develop scenes and characters in his painted work. Removed from its purely observational qualities, drawing becomes a projection of the artist’s intuition, imagination and memory. Representational and figurative elements in Taylor’s paintings create narrative frameworks that are unravelled to varying degrees through abstract marking.
In late 2018, Chilean Artist, Maria Jose Benvenuto, swapped her home city of Santiago, situated in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges, for the scrubby bush lands and oceanic horizons of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. For an artist whose practice had, up until that point, been informed by the imposing mountain peaks that looked down on her previous home, Benvenuto was struck by the endless vistas of Sydney’s landscape.
Mylyn Nguyen has developed several solo exhibitions that have humorously explored her childhood memories and curiosities. These comprehensive bodies of work, as well as several smaller projects, have varied in appearance, approach and materials yet all are imbued with an incredible skill and wondrous imagination that continues to extend the sense of spectacle and intrigue her artworks generate.
Nemo Jantzen, born 1970 in The Haque, studied art, design and photography at the RTO Art Academy in Rotterdam. After his studies, he moved to Antwerp to work as a graphic designer and bill-board artist while further developing his technique and style as a fine artist. Finally, after several years in Belgium and some worldly travels, he settled down in Spain where he dedicated his career to fine art.
Mark Howson was born in Staffordshire, England and arrived Australia in 1969. He was a founding member of Roar Studios – one of Melbourne’s earliest (fiercest) artist-run-initiatives. Howson’s art practise encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture. His work is highly regarded for it’s meditative, cubist style, which developed from vigourous expressionism into avant-garde abstraction. Popular representations include simple, textural forms in carefully balanced, bright compositions.
Since graduating from the National Art School in 2020, light and shadow have remained integral to Suzanna Vangelov’s artistic practice. Working predominantly with abstract painting, she is deeply influenced by the natural environment that surrounds her.
Todd Fuller is a well-known Australian Artist whose work extends traditional notions of drawing across film, animation and performance works. Fuller is best known for his hand drawn animations which address a broad range of themes including Queer and Regional Narratives of Australia past and present. His narratives often position audiences to consider connection between person and place, love and loss, commonality, difference and belonging.
Luke Thurgate is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land (Sydney). He teaches drawing and painting at the National Art School, where he graduated in 2021 with a Master of Fine Art. Luke has an extensive exhibition history including recent exhibitions at Grafton Regional Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Backwoods Gallery, Burra Regional Art Gallery, National Art School and Adelaide Central Gallery. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, the 2020 Tom Bass Figurative Sculpture Prize and the 2022 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award.
“Nephros,” – meaning Kidney in Greek.
Sydney epoxy resin artist Rick Carlino has been creating large scale works which explore the fluidity and viscosity of a notoriously rebellious medium for the last decade. Drawing on his diverse creative and professional career, which has included music composition and brand design, Rick creates vivid contemporary artworks which showcase his love of colour.
With ten years refining his craft and aesthetic in Melbourne and Japan, Hugh designs and creates beautiful objects from wood, capturing proportion, composition, functionality, and durability.
Elefteria Vlavianos was born in Zimbabwe of mixed Armenian and Greek heritage. She is an abstract painter who’s visual practice has developed through an ongoing investigation into the process abstraction, its vocabulary and conventions as a visual translation of a displaced cultural aesthetic. Her paintings draw on her multi-cultural Armenian and Greek heritage. Imagery in her paintings is derived from her current research of thirteenth century Armenian Manuscript Paintings and the tradition of Armenian textile crafts. Continued themes within her practice and paintings, are time, silence, presence and memory as they tie into a dialogue between representation, visibility and abstract painting. In this framework issue such a colour, structure, and mark making are key concerns as they translate across time, space and between two idioms in painting.
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