Sydney Contemporary 2026 | Photography

Five of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary photographers will unveil new and recent work at Sydney Contemporary, with our expansive survey drawing visitors into the distinct visual worlds of Tamara Dean, Murray Fredericks, Scott Perkins, Leila Jeffreys and Petrina Hicks.

Among the defining image-makers of her generation, Tamara Dean arrives at the fair amid an extraordinary run of recognition for her forthcoming series The Garden, with works from the project shortlisted for four major accolades over the last three months, including this year’s Bowness Photography Prize. Moving between terrestrial and underwater settings, The Garden entwines bodies, flowers and fabric in dreamlike compositions that explore femininity, transformation and our entanglement with the natural world.

Newly represented Murray Fredericks makes his first art fair appearance with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin ahead of his inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery in October. Bringing together works from his seminal Salt and Blaze series with his 2026 Bowness-shortlisted Dog Fence Project, Fredericks’s Sydney Contemporary showing reflects almost three decades of sustained solitary immersion in remote environments, distilling light, horizon and elemental interventions into images of arresting stillness and psychological intensity.

Following the resounding success of his recent Aotearoa Art Fair presentation, Scott Perkins will debut a new suite of brooding forest landscapes. Light, material and illusion sit at the core of the New Zealand-born, Eora/Sydney-based artist’s highly atmospheric practice, with bespoke lightboxes, handcrafted timber, Japanese washi and metallic papers transforming his photographs into sculptural, almost cinematic objects.

Sydney Contemporary will coincide with the announcement of Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s representation of Leila Jeffreys. Best known for her extraordinary portraits of birds photographed at human scale, Jeffreys has spent more than 15 years subverting the conventions of portraiture, bringing an arresting intimacy to subjects more commonly observed at a distance through a practice that now spans photography, moving image and installation.

Rounding out our photography exhibition, internationally lauded artist Petrina Hicks will unveil new photographs on the heels of a notable run of record-breaking auction results for her historical works – including an edition of her 2014 Bowness Prize-winning work Venus. The subject of major institutional surveys at the NGV and Museum of Australian Photography, Hicks has honed an ultra-refined visual language in which uncanny stillness and seductive polish are undercut by subtle tension and ambiguity, drawing on motifs from classical myth, folklore and art history to conjure images poised between beauty and disquiet.

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