Sydney Contemporary 2026 | Sculpture

Three large-scale sculptural installations will anchor Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s 10th anniversary Sydney Contemporary presentation, with each artist reshaping inherited traditions and figurative conventions through a deeply personal visual language and idiosyncratic approach to materiality.

Troy Emery’s new series of sculptures for Sydney Contemporary introduces feather plumes into the tactile, soft-sculptural vocabulary for which he is widely celebrated. Remixing references to art and natural history, decorative craft and museum display, Emery fashions magnificent, otherworldly animal forms as playful representations of the unknowable other, reflecting on our position within, and apart from, the natural world. His embrace of silky threads, knitted loops, beadwork and now feathers has long set the softness, ornament and flamboyance of his work against the hard, masculinist conventions and monumental pretensions of art-historical sculpture. This fluid exchange between sculpture and textiles was further affirmed by Emery’s 2025 Tapestry Design Prize win for a loomed translation of one of his sculptural creatures.

Currently in France completing a three-month residency at Moly-Sabata, which will culminate this September with a new, site-responsive work at the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Mai Nguyễn-Long returns to Sydney Contemporary amid an extraordinary run of institutional recognition both at home and abroad. A significant assembly of her Vomit Girl sculptures is currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, marking the series’ first public outing since it was acquired in its entirety for the museum’s collection at last year’s art fair. This follows her expansive commission for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, now held in the QAGOMA Collection, as well as showings at Perth Festival and Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, which followed her residency with the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Across these increasingly ambitious projects, Nguyễn-Long has developed a teeming sculptural universe in which strange, visceral ceramic figures give physical form to ineffable aspects of diasporic experience, drawing fragments of Vietnamese folk culture into a deeply personal mythology shaped by questions of inheritance, estrangement and self-understanding.

One of the most important figures to emerge in Australian sculpture over the past three decades, Linde Ivimey will unveil a new suite of her extraordinary figurative works at Sydney Contemporary. Since her career-defining exhibition Close to the Bone at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2003, Ivimey has developed an instantly recognisable sculptural language from an improbable material vocabulary of bone, fabric, wax, metal and hair. Meticulously assembled yet possessing a raw, almost primal presence, her enigmatic figures transform reclaimed and intimately handled materials into strange repositories for memory, vulnerability and lived experience. Devoid of recognisable facial features yet uncannily human in gesture and bearing, they move between darkness and playfulness, tenderness and unease, macabre and seductive – at once intensely personal while speaking to something universal in the complexity and strangeness of human experience.

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