Solo Booths at Sydney Contemporary
Sydney Contemporary 2025 presents an exciting mix of solo booths, where an exhibitor dedicates their entire space to showcase one artist. Solo booths create a focused and immersive experience, allowing visitors to connect with the work and the artist’s vision.
Michael Lett presents Mike Hewson
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Mike Hewson is a visual artist with a background in structural engineering and heavy-civil construction. His award-winning projects pioneer new ways to merge conceptual art projects into the public realm.
Hewson’s playful manipulation of materials will be evident in a new suite of unique small sculptures to be exhibited for the first time at Sydney Contemporary 2025.
Titled GeoPets, these sculptures reconfigure vitrified construction bricks with crystals, rare gems and homewares to spirited effect. The art fair booth will operate like a grocery store, with GeoPets priced by weight, and packaged with the ease of a cash and carry style transaction in a custom designed-for- life tote bag.
Pictured: GeoPets (studio production detail), 2025.
PAULNACHE presents Peata Larkin
PAULNACHE presents a solo installation by newly represented contemporary Māori artist Peata Larkin (Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Tūwharetoa). Her mahi toi, or artwork, is often described in terms of weaving—whether through the fabric she paints on, the resemblance to tukutuku panels, or allusions to digitised data, genetic electrophoresis, and whakapapa. The installation will consist of all-new work drawn from Larkin’s recent book You Are Here (written with cousin Whiti Hereaka) and explores ancestral energies. The book is the sixth title in Massey University Press’s Kōrero series. This marks Peata Larkin’s debut at Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks.
Pictured: Their Names and Stories Are Here (detail), 2025.
Redbase Art presents Shen Shaomin
At Sydney Contemporary 2025, Shen Shaomin presents a haunting and thought-provoking installation featuring 2,000 mechanical carps made from silica gel and electronics, faintly breathing and struggling across a stark white salt flat. Drawing on the Chinese carp’s symbolism as both a national icon of good fortune and an ecological paradox, the artist explores cultural mythology, mass production, and environmental disruption. Set against the backdrop of internet culture and commodification, the work questions what happens when natural symbols are removed from their context and repackaged for a digital, commercial age. This poetic, immersive piece invites viewers to reflect on the boundary between artificial life and natural ecosystems, and our role in shaping both.
Pictured: Chinese Carp (detail), 2018.
The Commercial presents Angela Brennan
Gadigal Country Sydney
Angela Brennan: On Being an Atom is an exuberant showcase of senior artist Angela Brennan’s extraordinary practice. Premiering at Sydney Contemporary, the presentation features a striking series of major new oil paintings, rare and highly sought-after ceramics, and for the first time, an original bronze sculpture created especially for the fair. This dynamic body of work highlights Brennan’s continued evolution across mediums, offering viewers a unique opportunity to experience the full scope of her creative vision.
Pictured: Not Long Before That Not Even Now, 2025.
The Renshaws present Michael Georgetti
The Renshaws present a solo exhibition of Melbourne-based artist Michael Georgetti, featuring a focused selection of new wall-based and freestanding floor paintings. Blending painting, sculpture, and installation, Georgetti’s work is defined by his distinctive three-dimensional conceptual approach, often infused with an anthropological sensibility and a critical eye on display politics. Rejecting traditional hanging methods, he incorporates gleaming silver and brass frames that act as cultural signifiers for branding, logos, and layered meaning. These frames become visual elements themselves, blurring the line between image and object. Georgetti evokes modernist nostalgia while his raw collage compositions disrupt expectations and engage with Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the aura of the art object.
Pictured: Chess Piece (Quartier), 2024.
Jonathan Smart Gallery (Christchurch, NZ) presents Julia Morison
Ōtautahi Christchurch
Jonathan Smart Gallery / Emily Gardener Projects present an immersive, artist-led installation by Julia Morison at Sydney Contemporary 2025. The work expands on Morison’s exploration of ancient systems of knowledge, spiritual symbolism, and the collective unconscious. Developed with a curatorium including Morison, graphic designers Alice Bonifant and Harriet Herlund, and literary academic Dr Anna Smith, the project Four Worlds Tarot II follows its debut at Aotearoa Art Fair 2024. It reinterprets Tarot’s arcane systems for contemporary audiences, featuring a set of 78 digitally illustrated cards designed by Morison. Visitors can engage with live “readings” by Smith, who explores future possibilities, and Herlund, who applies the cards to design-based problem solving. The material raises questions about the psychological power of imagery—whether hand-drawn or digital works carry more weight. The designs combine the pathways of the sefirah from the kabbalistic Tree of Life into a single graphic structure. Visitors may purchase limited-edition boxed card sets, alongside a new suite of sculptural works.
Pictured: Four Worlds Tarot, 2024.
Nasha Gallery presents Mark Maurangi Carroll
Gadigal Country Sydney
Mark Maurangi Carroll presents Islands not to scale (ueata) – Act III, the final chapter in a triptych exploring scale, movement, and representation from a diasporic Pacific perspective. The title, taken from a 1980s Cook Islands tourism brochure, becomes a conceptual prompt interrogating how Pacific geography and culture are misrepresented when islands are treated as marginal and voided of meaning. Carroll reframes these ideas through his visual language.
Pictured: Second spring (gold), 2025.
Niagara Galleries presents Julia Ciccarone
This will be Julia Ciccarone’s first solo presentation in Sydney. Audiences may be familiar with her work as she was the 2024 Len Fox People’s Choice Award Winner & the 2021 Archibald Prize ANZ People’s Choice Award Winner (she has also been a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize, The Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize).
This solo presentation of new paintings by Julia Ciccarone has never been exhibited before. The Melbourne-based artist has long explored our relationship to the environment and the burden of responsibility through evocative paintings that incorporate both figurative and landscape traditions. Through interconnected works, Julia Ciccarone engages with the importance of narrative to both view the past and look to the future.
Sometimes appearing to the artist in complete compositions through dreams and visions, the scenes within Julia Ciccarone’s paintings incorporate lived and imagined scenes. After she intricately storyboards the majority of works within a series, the artist translates scenes onto canvas in her studio. Although Ciccarone sketches, photographs and documents her models (her family and friends) in situ, using items from her own life as props, experience and atmosphere are more important than specific locations and individuals. Ciccarone creates an entire world that you can’t help but be invested in.
Julia Ciccarone’s interest in the relationship between painting and the moving image is reflected in the strong cinematic narrative that runs through her work and her approach to each series of paintings. Ciccarone has worked alongside film director Kasimir Burgess, variously as art director, producer and conceptual artist, contributing to four short films, music videos and the feature length film Fell.
Pictured: In the dream of the man dreaming the dreamt man awoke, 2025.
