At Sydney Contemporary 2024, Troy Emery will present a curated installation of new sculptures. This presentation assembles a cast of wild and magnificent creatures that slink, sashay and strike languorous poses on plinths and podiums staged in prime position at the Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin booth.

Sculpted with a couturier’s precision and imaginative flourish, Emery’s impossible fauna reflect his enduring fascination with nature. Drawing on art history, science, decorative crafts, and camp sensibilities, these fringed and fabulous bodies speak to the complex entanglements of human and non-human worlds.

Sign up now to be the first to receive exclusive previews and priority access to this upcoming release before the art fair launches at Carriageworks this September.

For acquisition enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

For Sydney Contemporary 2024, West Australian painter Carly Le Cerf casts her highly attuned eye towards the lush and rugged topography of the New South Wales Blue Mountains region. Earlier this year, Le Cerf was awarded the Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiative residency, an opportunity she has used to produce her art fair-bound body of work.

On view at the fair will be a sweeping panoramic triptych capturing the bush-carpeted Walls Lookout – a dazzling departure from the red-earth western desert regions the artist is well known for exploring.

“In the endless sea of trees visible from the mountain’s edge, I find inspiration in the sublime – where the boundlessness of nature sparks a creative urge to capture even a fragment of its infinite beauty,” says Le Cerf, who will exhibit at Sydney Contemporary for the third time.

Those interested in acquiring works from this upcoming release are strongly encouraged to contact the gallery ahead of the art fair. For enquiries, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

A magnificent selection of new paintings by Betty Chimney will show at Sydney Contemporary 2024, supplying collectors with the opportunity to acquire new work by one of Australia’s most beloved contemporary painters.

Chimney is firmly at the forefront of the extraordinarily innovative and globally acclaimed new wave of contemporary First Nations painters working at Iwantja Arts, the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre at Indulkana, where she is also Director.

This year, visitors will encounter the largest examples of the artist’s work to date, including an extraordinary three-metre-wide painting created in collaboration with her daughter, Raylene Walatinna.

One week prior to the art fair, select paintings will be available to view by appointment at Michael Reid Sydney in Chippendale. To make an appointment, or to enquire about available paintings ahead fo the art fair, please contact willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au

At Sydney Contemporary 2024, Mai Nguyễn-Long will present The Vomit Girl Project at Installation Contemporary, curated by Talia Linz.

Positioned at the entrance to the fair, the kaleidoscopic display collides inspiration from cultural artefacts and personal family history to represent diasporic narratives. The work encompasses a selection of clay characters inspired by đình wood carvings and a Vietnamese rural aesthetic known as mộc mạc. Mộc mạc is generally translated as rough, rustic or even uncouth. To the artist, however, it is an earthy aesthetic guided by practical principles of survival, providing a primordial link to Indigenous Vietnamese nature-spirit consciousness and mother goddess practices in Vietnam.

Nguyễn-Long’s The Vomit Girl Project is a way for the artist to unpack her conflicted relationship with her Vietnamese heritage and is connected to notions of resistance, belonging and self-determination. Fluid associations and playful and unorthodox expressions of Buddhism inform her clay-building method. These figures and vessels are occasionally marked with broken chopsticks, extracted human teeth and porcupine quill. Nguyễn-Long’s vomit motif becomes an ambiguous and tongue-like form, representing one’s mother tongue, as well as those who have lost their mother tongue.

This major presentation precedes the artist’s participation in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial at QAGOMA, which opens later this year.

To enquire about the sculptural works comprising The Vomit Girl Project by Mai Nguyễn-Long, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au