Sydney Contemporary 2024

As galleries from across Australia, New Zealand, and much further afield were setting up their stalls with the works of over 400 contemporary artists within Sydney’s cavernous Carriageworks—overseen by Lisa Roet’s enormous twenty-metre wide Skywalker Gibbon— Scottish painter Peter Doig revealed in The Guardian that while his much-coveted paintings have sold for an estimated £380 million, he has “barely seen £230,000” of that money. The reason? Most of these great paintings have been sold and resold on the secondary market, in auction houses and at art fairs. Versions of his White Canoe have successfully come under the hammer for £21 million and £30 million, with the auction houses making far, far more than the artist. Doig doesn’t even know who now owns most of them or where they are. Possibly stored indefinitely in climate-controlled free ports in Rotterdam or Switzerland. All this a reminder that the art world is the largest unregulated industry in the world after cryptocurrency and drugs, and insider trading isn’t a crime.

As an artist I’ve always felt ambivalent about art fairs (attending my first in Cologne in 1984), but as a fiction writer I love them for the complex range of characters, situations, and jaw-dropping statistics, mostly revolving around money, sex, and drugs. Not long after this, I began my on-going Superfiction, The Art Fair Murders, speculating on what would happen if a serial killer was loose in the art world killing a different art fair personality at all the major fairs in 1989.

With all of the above buzzing around in my head, I set off with a spring in my step to explore the eighty-six galleries comprising the 2024 edition of Sydney Contemporary. I decided to start with the two financial extremes to be found at the fair—the most expensive work and the cheapest. I would then fill in the gaps, while looking for aesthetic excellence rather than price-tags alone. It didn’t take long to hear the buzz about the $3.35 million Emily Kam Kngwarray at Utopia Art Sydney. Nothing beats an Emily. And who knew that the gallery’s Director Christopher Hodges was such a sensitive painter with his two-metre square striped canvas. But what of the cheapest work at the fair? The excellent Works on Paper section threw up a few obvious choices, but in the end it was the free artworks that children could make and take home with them from The Blue Room, presented by Lara Merrett and Sullivan + Strumpf. This was a hugely popular part of Kid Contemporary.

Zoe Paulsen is the freshly hatched incoming Sydney Contemporary art fair director, and herself a young mother. She has mapped exciting routes for visitors to this year’s edition. She already has a wealth of art world experience, from being a Museum of Contemporary Art Young Ambassador to launching The Other Art Fair in 2015. And she has a mother, Lisa, who is a fanatical art collector. Zoe Paulsen, grew up surrounded by artworks by Rosalie Gascoigne, Tracey Moffatt, Noel McKenna, Simon Yates, David Capra, Robert MacPherson, and Patricia Piccinini. But she also wants to enhance what is already successful. So, there are four program strands not unlike the ones I reviewed for Artist Profile during the previous two fairs: Installation Contemporary, Talk Contemporary, Performance Contemporary, and the afore-mentioned Kids Contemporary. There are VIP visits to artist studios. And there are international interventions such as Shanghai-born multimedia artist Lu Yang with a work that premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale. New and old Indigenous art can be found everywhere, from the vastly expanded works on paper section to Niagara Galleries museum quality Angelina Pwerle suite of new works, to the APY Art Centre Collective’s installation of 200 traditional weapons suspended from the roof, and Daniel Boyd’s new work at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery’s booth where she is celebrating a heady forty-two years of trading as one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries. A special attraction here are rare early works by Imants Tillers, and equally early photographic prints from Bill Henson. But with the Indigenous offerings it is hard to go past the early Johnny Warsngula painting on board at D’Lan Contemporary. To see one painting of this power and strength makes a visit to Sydney Contemporary worthwhile. He was one of the original Papunya artists working with Geoffrey Bardon in 1971. Almost as satisfying, I found Mitch Cairns at The Commercial, and the always inventive Henry Jock Walker, turning discarded wet suits into glowing pieces of abstract art, courtesy of Egg & Dart.

So, art fair booths themselves are the main drawcard. Just as the work of individual artists can vary enormously in quality, so the booths can veer from the sublime and well-curated to the over-crowded and ill-conceived.

If you can’t wait for the 100 Surrealist Magrittes to go on show at the Art Gallery of NSW this summer, you can get your own fix, and purchase, a choice of three Michael Vale off-the-scale-weird and wonderful canvases at James Makin Gallery, or some ultra-cool abstractions from Emma Coulter. And staying with abstraction, don’t miss Five Walls Gallery, based in the multi-cultural Footscray and one of the most visited of Melbourne venues, always with an intelligent mix of local, national, and international artists. Elsewhere, a real fireworks display of a booth comes from MAGMA Gallery and Jacob Hoerner Galleries sharing a space. The former with Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s seductive works alongside Hoerner’s complex imagery supplied by Alex Hamilton—once a musician with the band The Saints. His fragile, scratchy surfaces are actually personal musical notations, and if you are lucky he sometimes plays his trumpet at gallery openings, as if dueting with the paint and the Perspex.

Interspersed with the booths are special projects for the art fair often in conjunction with the artists’ own galleries. Patricia Piccinini’s works can be found here, as can Stephen Bird’s “industrial sabotage” ceramics presented in partnership with OLSEN Gallery under the title Continent of Exiles. In plain language it is “a group of ceramic figures and platters arranged to animate the industrial landscape of Carriageworks.” The artist describes these as “like a family (re)uniting, but each individual remaining elusive and inhabiting a world of their own.”

The pleasure of art fairs can come at the turn of a corner when suddenly you are confronted with astonishing art. This happened to me at Darren Knight Gallery with Louise Weaver’s Premonition of Love and Noel McKenna’s vignettes of domestic absurdity. As it did with Neon Parc’s superb stand of historical and contemporary artworks.

And amongst this kaleidoscope of technique and concepts it is possible to stumble across nascent tendencies, in my own case what I call “neo-trompe l’oeil”—fooling the eye in contemporary terms. One gallery, Redbase Art, displayed what appeared to be a scungy bathroom with stained tiles, but your reaction changes when you learn the whole installation is woven. And at Lennox Street Gallery from Richmond, the anamorphic image of a skull, seemingly floating in mid-air, fools both the eyes and the intellect. And the artist, Louis Pratt had to complete a PhD to acquire the skills to magic it up. The same gallery has a classic Howard Arkley from the late 1990s.

And if you get tired, after hours, sometimes days of walking the aisles of Carriageworks, go to one of the Talk Contemporary presentations for a good sit down and some mental stimulation. I found myself in one called The New Tastemakers: The Future of Collecting with Cassandra Bird, Jordan Gogos, and Jesse-Jack de Deyne. Bird had an exciting and ever-evolving stand. And de Deyne talked passionately about the joys of selling art on the secondary market, taking us back to where we started and the tribulations of Peter Doig.

Last year Sydney Contemporary had 25,000 visitors and $21 million in sales. We await to hear how this year’s edition went. But there was a real feel of optimism and new beginnings about the place.

EXHIBITION
Sydney Contemporary 2024 
5 – 8 September 2024 
Carriageworks, Sydney