Sydney Contemporary 2022:
Advisory Selections

Julia Trybala at STATION

Julia Trybala's Nude (2022) is representative of the artist's characteristically sinuous, contorted, and intertwined bodies, tightly squeezed into their frames. The Melbourne-based artist plays with a range of colour schemes: from quiet, melancholic blues, to acidic hues reminiscent of Mannerism. Here, she has opted for burnt oranges and purples, with bright red for the pair of nipples that penetrate the surrounding earthy tones.

Often, amidst the mass of entangled limbs in Trybala's paintings, it is possible to make out the slits of eyes that covertly—or not so covertly—measure the viewer. As described by STATION director Samantha Barrow to Ocula Magazine, Trybala's figures 'subvert the historically dominant male gaze by depicting scenes of familial care, both tender and claustrophobic, from the female perspective'.

Trybala graduated with a BFA from RMIT University in 2016. Earlier this year, she held a solo exhibition, titled Arch, at G/ART/EN Gallery in Como, Italy (8 June–29 July 2022).

Kate Newby at Michael Lett / Fine Arts, Sydney

Kate Newby's you run it (2021) comprises hundreds of individual clay micro-vessels, fired while partially filled with collected broken glass. The result is a sprawling constellation of translucent 'puddles', delicately held within earthen concave forms.

Originally presented as part of Newby's solo exhibition, YES TOMORROW (2021) at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, New Zealand, you run it continues the artist's enquiry into site-specificity and materiality. Newby's practice engages materials, processes, and actions from the places around which her work is exhibited.

The Auckland-born artist lives and works in rural Floresville, Texas, where she moved at the end of 2020. There she has developed an open-air studio, working closely with the surrounding elements in an improvisational manner.

Earlier in 2022, Newby's solo exhibition, Try doing anything without it, was held at Galerie Art : Concept, Paris. Most recently, Newby presented a new commission in the group exhibition Reclaim the Earth, curated by Daria de Beauvais at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022)

Kate Newby's work will be presented alongside stand-out pieces by Simon Denny, Peter Stichbury, Julian Dashper, Michael Stevenson, and Hany Armanious.

Isaac Julien at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Since 2012, U.K. artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien has held a fascination with the life and work of Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-born trailblazer of Brazilian modernist architecture and design.

Julien noted his fascination with Bardi to Ocula Magazine in 2014, describing her as 'a complex character', being a Marxist from a bourgeois background. Bardi spent her life championing the cultural and social possibilities of art and architecture made for people.

For Sydney Contemporary, Roslyn Oxley9 presents two large photographic prints by Julien from Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019)—a multi-channel film installation and photography series that pays homage to Bardi's architectural vision and career.

Julien's Encruzilhadas / Crossroads (2019) engages with the fluidity, humanness, and cultural resonance of Bardi's modernism. A female dancer swirls in billowing red fabric before Bardi's distinctive helical staircase in the Museum of Popular Art in Salvador, echoing its form and noble elegance that marries abstract geometry with traditional materials.

This year, Isaac Julien received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours for his services to diversity and inclusion in art.

Vincent Namatjira at THIS IS NO FANTASY

Vincent Namatjira garnered acclaim in 2014, when his paintings of Albert Namatjira—the revered Aranda painter and his great-grandfather—were acquired by Queensland Art Gallery. Since then, caricatures of well-known political and public figures have become a hallmark of his practice—as seen in his participation in the recent group exhibition, Iwantja Rock n Roll at Fort Gansevoort, New York (7 July–20 August 2022).

Namatjira often places his subjects against the unlikely backdrop of Australian landscapes, where, as he told Ocula Magazine in 2018, they are 'out of their comfort zone', and 'their power is stripped away'.

This is the case with The Royal Tour (Vincent and Elizabeth on Country) (2022), one of Namatjira's paintings presented by THIS IS NO FANTASY. Here, the artist is seen standing at a distance from Queen Elizabeth II in a desert, with each posing for a different camera, a conspicuous black-and-white royal carriage between them.

THIS IS NO FANTASY is also showing works by artist and poet Johnathon World Peace Bush. Using a simplified palette of natural ochres—the colours of Tiwi people—Bush reconfigures Tiwi ceremonial patterns, body paint designs, and Catholic iconography. Bush was recently included in the group exhibition, WHO ARE YOU: Australian Portraiture at the National Gallery of Victoria (25 March–21 August 2022).

Grace Wright at Gallery 9

Grace Wright's painting Views For A Flower (2022) suggests a mass of what could be deities, dragons, or dragonflies, commingling above a lake at sunset. The interplay of light and shadow has all the drama of a Baroque landscape or a Chinese silk painting, but the image never fully coalesces into something figurative. Wright's work is more gestural, more felt, and more open to interpretation.

Born in Tauranga in 1992, Grace Wright studied at New Zealand's leading art school, Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, where she completed an MFA in 2019. She is represented by Gallery 9 in Sydney, Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland and Yavuz Gallery in Singapore.

Gordon Walters at Starkwhite

One of New Zealand's most influential modernists, Gordon Walters abstracted the Māori koru motif in pursuit of exacting refinement.

The Wellington-born artist's practice was in part shaped by a visit to painter and photographer Theo Schoon in 1946, who was then photographing Māori rock art. Walters' work became increasingly geometric, as he synthesised intricate, culturally-significant patterns with hard-edged abstraction.

On show in Starkwhite and 1301SW's shared booth is Walters' mature painting, Untitled (1995), which depicts a pared-back rendition of the artist's signature curvilinear motif. Left behind is a singular interlocking frond, mirrored in a passage of red on the opposing edge, creating a tension between form and absence.

Speaking to Ocula Magazine, 1301SW's director Jack Willet highlighted that Walters' works, along with those of Billy Apple and Bill Henson, will form a 'grounding for a larger presentation exploring a couple of key artistic conversations for the fair'. Works by Fiona Pardington and Petra Cortright will also be presented.