13 to 16 September 2018: the four days during which Australia’s largest city is taken over by the art world.
With walks, talks, tours and more on offer, Sydney Contemporary has all your bases covered. There’s even specialty fair dining, including a restaurant, pop-up cafes and wine and spirit bars.
As for the art, a wide range of dealer galleries from all over the world flock to the fair each year, and 2018’s no exception. Ones we’ve got our eye on include London’s Flowers Gallery, Sydney’s Kronenberg Wright, Melbourne’s Lisa Fehily Contemporary Art, and Fox Jensen & Fox Jensen McCrory which has galleries in both Sydney and Auckland, New Zealand.
With an established department in contemporary international photography, Flowers Gallery is bringing a number of artists who specialise in the medium. These include Boomoon (b. 1955, South Korea), Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955, Canada) and Nadav Kander (b. 1961, Israel). These three exceptional artists use the camera to their advantage, each using the medium to capture the world in distinctly unique styles.
Kronenberg Wright Artists Projects is a gallery from East Sydney that represents some of Australia’s most important and innovative contemporary artists. This year the gallery is showing work from Reko Rennie (b. 1974, Australia), an artist known for his hypnotic, repetitive patterns, bright colours and bold lines. Rennie uses art to explore his Aboriginal identity and incite discussion around indigenous culture and identity.
Also working with identity, though approaching it from a rather different angle, is artist Coady (full name Catherine Coady), who is represented by Lisa Fehily Contemporary Art in Melbourne. Coady parodies aspects of contemporary society while inverting notions of value and status at the same time. She is perhaps best known for her aesthetic minimalist wall-mounted pill-packet sculptures in pop art style.
Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention Jan Albers (b. 1971, Germany) from Fox Jensen (Sydney) and Fox Jensen McCrory (Auckland). Albers unifies painting with spatial works, predominantly producing wall sculptures made from metal, wood, polystyrene and/or ceramic pieces. These abstract reliefs eschew convention with their structural depth, requiring the viewer to look ‘into’ them, as opposed to ‘at’.
If you’re lucky enough to find yourself on the stunning east coast of Australia, we highly recommend you pay a visit to this year’s Sydney Contemporary.
![Louis Wain, ‘A Tea Party on the Lawn’ realised £7,500 in 2005 at Bonhams [detail]. Photo: Bonhams via Barnebys Price Bank](https://images.prismic.io/barnebys/03dd95e6-6baf-4927-9b6e-a0e73eecdb56_Cover.jpg?auto=compress,format)
