What Are Galleries Showing at Melbourne Art Fair 2024?
In collaboration with Melbourne Art Fair 2024

Directors of seven Australian galleries—1301SW, THIS IS NO FANTASY, Roslyn Oxley9, Tolarno, Martin Browne Contemporary, Ames Yavuz, and Gallery 9—share artwork highlights ahead of the fair.

Dominic Kavanagh, Associate Director at Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney

Martin Browne Contemporary is presenting a trio of women artists: Ildiko Kovacs, Virginia Leonard, and Bronte Leighton-Dore. They are at different stages of their careers, but are unified by a consistently dynamic approach to art-making.

One absolute highlight will be Virginia Leonard's Fi Fi (2023), a functional fountain that will be bubbling away for the entirety of the fair. Virginia is based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and is one of the most internationally recognised ceramicists from this part of the world. This is Virginia's first use of water in her practice. She described the difficulty of working with the medium, saying that it 'finds the easiest way to escape ... it misbehaves!' The result is spectacular.

A second highlight is a presentation of new paintings and drawings by Ildiko Kovacs—the first in Melbourne since she was awarded the 2015 Bulgari Art Award. Her extraordinary wall of 60 drawings has an amazing genesis. After an 18-month period away from the studio, Ildiko returned creatively recharged in early 2023. Since then, she has found herself on many evenings literally 'drawing until dawn', obsessively driven to get down on paper the outpouring of creative energy that she is experiencing. We are delighted to be sharing these.

Jack Willet, Director at 1301SW, Melbourne

1301SW and Starkwhite's presentation features, to my mind, three of the most significant painters of the current generation in Australia: Tim Bučković, Coen Young, and Jelena Telecki. Expressive, atmospheric, and beguiling, their works contain differing versions of what can be best described as an unseen magnetism, greatly felt but somewhat hidden.

It is our debut with the Croatian-born, Sydney-based painter Telecki, with recent works that fuse her trademark exploration of absurdity via a surrealist visualisation of the personal and political. In these works, the powerful, idolised, submissive, and secretive collide—matched by her masterful manoeuvring of oils.

I have closely followed Bučković since his art school days, featuring him on projects over the years. Young has been the most recent revelation for me. With his alchemical process and remarkable dedication to his vision, he offers the abstract element to this trio of painters. It will be the first time all three have been presented together and I very much look forward to seeing their rich practices in conversation.

Equally masterful in technique and with their own take on the absurd is the Brisbane-based artist Michael Zavros, who will be presenting his major new work, The New Belvedere, for the first time in Australia. The fourth in his much-acclaimed 'Versailles' series, this truly astonishing painting perfectly articulates Zavros' intrigue in contemporary mythologies, aspiration, beauty, decadence, and narcissism. The photo-realist piece is a hyper-aestheticized fusion of the 18th-century ornamental building—the Belvedere in the English Gardens—with a mirror-finished weightlifting bench, planted on the grass at the front of the scene.

Nicola Stein and Dianne Tanzer, Co-directors at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne

We are premiering Ali Tahayori's latest body of work, 'Archive of Longing'. Ali trained as a medical doctor in his birthplace of Shiraz, Iran, and has worked as a doctor in Sydney, where he now lives.

Since completing his Master of Fine Art in 2022 at the National Art School in Sydney, Ali's career has been exceptional, with a current exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and recent presentations at Unseen Amsterdam and Photo London in 2023. Ali's work combines the political and the personal, unpicking themes of displacement, otherness, identity and belonging, often with a subversive undertone.

Taking archival photographs from his family album as a starting point, these latest works blur time, place, and materials to investigate notions of identity. Printed onto glass, the photographic images are fractured by elements of hand-cut glass. Ali draws on the Iranian craft of Āine-Kāri (mirror works), which may have evolved from the reuse of broken mirrors imported from Europe, turning these fragments into something uniquely Iranian. Similarly, in his practice, Ali reframes ideas, materials, and processes to create uniquely personal works.

Ali's works will be shown with luminous golden vessels by Sydney ceramicist Alexandra Standen. Both artists draw on ancient Islamic traditions, reframing them in the modern world.

Victoria Scott, Director of Sales at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

At the heart of our presentation lies a nuance of opposition—moments of dark and light entwine, dualities coexist, meeting points between history and present converge—allowing for a twilight space of whispered conversations across generations: from our newer generation of artists including Kirtika Kain and Kaylene Whiskey, whose practice merges seamlessly with some of Australia's most established artists like Julie Rrap, Jenny Watson, Dale Frank, and Fiona Hall, to top international artists Isaac Julien and Renee So.

Isaac Julien's Western Union Series No.12 (Balustrade) (2007)—part of his iconic photography and film series, 'Western Union Small Boats'—traverses continents and cultures in a quest for the betterment of life. A body, arched and curved to echo the form of Baroque architecture, ascends the staircase carried from the shore to this opulent interior. Set in the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi, the famed Sicilian location for Luchino Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard (1963), two opposing worlds represent the dramatic contrasts of this series: the dual, entwining narratives journey into both Italian cinema and the historic movement of people from Africa to Europe, revealing themes of displacement, migration, and desire for capital.

Dark, moody, mysterious, and uplifting at the same time, Dale Frank's His sourly precious whisky like Wit like his manhood was giant to him, if no one else. (2014) epitomises this period of Frank's oeuvre in the gorgeously poured varnish: resplendent, swirling, melting with a brooding tonality of black and dark blue, jolted to the heavens with bright pink and blood red. This dramatic tension and luxurious surface are a precursor to his current reflective paintings. Time and motion appear suspended, alluding to the performance of painting itself. It shows Frank's rigorous commitment to material experimentation, the mastery of his craft, and the currency of this work ten years on.

Jan Minchin, Director at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Wanapati Yunupingu's monumental creation, Dhaŋutha – Fire, is the highlight of our presentation, and the artist's largest and most ambitious to date. It was made at his mother's homeland at Wandawuy in late 2023 to early 2024, using three signs salvaged from the local bauxite [sedimentary rock] mine in Nhulunbuy.

Breaking free from conventional media, Wanapati transforms discarded old street signs into shimmering depictions of his Gumatj clan identity. His work is focused on the spread of the first fire known as Gurtha, a fire of infinite and supernatural intensity—so powerful that it transforms the land it has touched, touches, and will touch, for all time. Its identity is etched into every atom of Gumatj land.

Wanapati's clan set fire to their country at the end of the dry season to renew the land. Fire is seen as a regenerating agent. Similarly, Wanapati, in his work, is regenerating ancient designs. He has likened the way his work moves and shimmers to fire itself.

Max Homaei and Nicole Hauser, Directors at Ames Yavuz, Sydney/Singapore

Following several major institutional shows last year, Abdul Abdullah's first presentation of 2024 is a new suite of works for Melbourne Art Fair. His paintings of anthropomorphised rocks within highly detailed natural idylls are playful reflections on the notion of journeys. Each work acts as a milestone for new beginnings, greeting and waving in a way that embraces seasonal change and implies a sense of reunion after a period of departure. This holds particular significance for the artist, with his recent move from Sydney to Bangkok.

Cybele Cox will present a pantheon of totems and figures that fuse symbols from the mythic world with utopian feminist fantasies. From bawdy goddesses and serene-faced moons to seductive hags and mushrooming breasts, her motifs come together to form a new belief system built on a reverence for hybrid bodies and a re-flowering of the spiritual and sensual. Night and Day is a double-faced spirit that speaks to the communion between the sun and the moon, above and below, and beginnings and endings.

Julian Meagher's recent paintings alight on the fleeting transitions from night to day, sleep to wakefulness. Connected to his larger body of work, Triple Rainbow—currently on view at Mudgee Arts Precinct—Rainbow #4 captures the fleeting, fractured light of a rainbow in glowing columns of paint that pulse like heartbeats. Meagher spends hours building up infinitesimal gradations of delicate oil paints, creating a sublime portrait of stillness that sits between abstraction and landscape. For Meagher, natural cycles are entwined with human emotion, and each painting encompasses personal hopes, despairs, and dreams, alongside the universal rhythms of time and nature.

Allan Cooley, Director at Gallery 9, Sydney

Two Rounds and a Sound (2023) by Kāryn Taylor is representative of the beauty, resonance, and complexity paradigmatic of her practice. The colours and dynamics of refracted light are compelling, changing across the day as the light does, giving life and activation to the otherwise static nature of interior spaces.

Kāryn describes the intention of establishing a resonant dynamic between colour and form, one that is radiating yet contained. She said, 'I wanted the dynamic to be palpable—a felt presence, maybe even heard.' Kāryn's practice brings together contemporary materiality and expression with the eternal nature of light and the ambiguities of reality, producing work that is punctual to this place in time. —[O]

Melbourne Art Fair 2024 runs from 22 to 25 February. Tickets are on sale now.