Sydney Contemporary 2026 | Sculpture

Three large-scale sculptural installations offer striking points of focus within 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 magnificent menagerie of otherworldly animals introduces extravagant feathered plumes to 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 playful representations of the unknowable other that reflect on our position within, and apart from, the natural world. His embrace of silky threads, knitted loops, glittering beadwork and now feathers sets the softness, ornament and flamboyance of his work against the hard, masculinist conventions and monumental pretensions of art-historical sculpture.

Currently in France completing a three-month residency at Moly-Sabata, which will culminate this month 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 projects at home and abroad. An assembly of her Vomit Girl sculptures is currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales following the series’ acquisition in its entirety at last year’s fair, while her expansive commission for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial is now held in the QAGOMA Collection.

One of the most important figures to emerge in Australian sculpture over the past three decades, Linde Ivimey unveils a new suite of 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.

Explore more from our Sydney Contemporary exhibition here. For enquiries, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au