Lives and works in Thirroul, Australia
Born 1962 Sydney Australia

Lynda Draper is a contemporary Australian artist who primarily works in the ceramic medium. Her practice explores the intersection between dreams and reality, shaped by fragmented images from her surrounding environment, recollected memories, and interest in talismans from ancient cultures.

Created by a combination of pinching and coiling hand building techniques, Draper’s ceramic sculptures evoke dreamlike, ethereal qualities with the visual fragility of paper or wax, and yet are instilled with the resilience and permanence of fired clay. The skeletal structures evolve intuitively, each part gradually cultivating the connective tissue of the work. Often towering into the air, they hold an anthropomorphic presence; each sculpture is imbued with a life of their own. Ultimately, Draper is interested in the relationship between the mind and material world, and the related phenomenon of the metaphysical. Creating art is her way of bridging the gap between these worlds and inviting contemplation about other possible realms.

Draper exhibited as a part of The National 4: Australian Art Now with her exhibition Talismans for Unsettled Times (2023) at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Draper has received numerous national and international awards, including being the recipient of the 2019 Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award. Other awards include the 16th International Gold Coast Ceramic Award, Queensland; Fisher’s Ghost Award, Sydney; and 54th Acquisition Award MIC, Faenza, Italy.

The artist’s works are held in significant national and international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; International Museum of Ceramics, Faenza, Italy; FA Grue Collection, Italy; Renwick Alliance Gallery, Smithsonian Institute Washington; Artbank, Australia; Collection of the Dutch Royal Family, Netherlands; IAC Collection FLICAM Museum, Fuping, China; Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Victoria; The Myer Foundation, Victoria; Campbelltown City Art Gallery; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; and the University of Wollongong, New South Wales.

Lives and works in Singapore
Born 1974 Patna, India

Kanchana Gupta’s practice yokes materiality with process and this is both the impetus and structure behind most of her works. The materials that she deploys range from quotidian socially loaded substances like vermillion powder, henna, and sandalwood, to oil paint and canvas, and to construction materials like jute and tarpaulin. Each brings its own particular identity, social symbology, texture, structure, and colour, which she manipulates using a combination of studio and industrial processes irreversibly altering the inherent properties and contexts.

Her ongoing fascination with the materiality of paint has seen her investigate the physicality of the medium in her two-dimensional works, mixed media, and more recently through her sculptural installations. Her practice has been described as a process-driven exploration of and response to, urban environments. The pressures of unprecedented migrations, rapid urbanization, and overwhelming globalization are expressed through the extreme manual and industrial duress that she subjects her medium to. Paint set on a substructure of quotidian material is ritually ripped, torn, detached, peeled, burnt, and compressed to produce works that expose the strata of a deeply personal geology.

Gupta has had several solo exhibitions including FOLDED PIERCED STRETCHED, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2022); 458.32 Square Meters, Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore (2019); Traces and Residues, Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore (2017); and Identity II, Institute of Contemporary Arts, LASALLE College of Arts, Singapore (2011). Her work was included in The Sceneries and Portraits of an Era - Featuring the Asia Collection of Benesse Art Site Naoshima at the Fukutake House Asian Gallery, Shodoshima, Japan, and she was a finalist in the prestigious The 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize.

Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is anchored by an experimental textile process, with which she interrogates her own relationships and the performance of selfhood.

Her figurative works are made primarily from donated fabric – worn clothes, slept-in sheets – and often replicate compositional moments from historical artworks, using her friends as models to respond to and reinvent the originals.

Garments often become physical artifacts of the past – stand-ins for those we have lost, or relics of who we once were. In this sense, Gutman works with the textures of memory, using found textiles as a vehicle for connection and collaboration. While Gutman’s process is labour intensive, it is not precious; edges are rough, seams are wonky and images are frayed all over. Her mode of sewing is at once tender and aggressive. She brings together disparate things in an act of ‘mending’, but violently punctures and rips the materials in order to do so. Not a seamstress in the traditional sense, her process is much like painting. The stories of the materials intertwine with the imagery to create a layered narrative.

In May 2023, Gutman was awarded the Archibald Prize, making her the youngest winner in 85 years. She was one of six exhibiting artists in Primavera at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2022. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney.

Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally in Rome, Milan and New York.

BORN

Lives and works in Paris, France
Born 1982 Sydney, Australia

Gregory Hodge is an Australian artist based in Paris, France since 2019. In residence at Cité international des Arts, Hodge is currently researching into the tapestries in the Gobelins Manufactory Paris and their influence on the Nabis paintings of Bonnard, Vuillard and Dennis in the Musée d’Orsay.

Hodge’s paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, layering personal source material with painterly gestural marks and obscured motifs of foliage, interiors and architecture. Achieved by using specially handmade tools and brushes, his ruminations on the way we see in many dimensions are based on his illustrations and photographs digitally collaged. These layered compositions convince as collage, with Hodge’s use of shadows and sharp edges reinforcing these intellectual as well as visual collisions, with forms and shapes seeming to hover and stack.

In paintings that appear to grapple with wanting to be representational, these gestures are designed to disrupt any coherent reading of the symbols and surfaces, and to return these densely packed paintings back to the subject and experience of painting.

These complex, finely wrought surfaces are rendered in highly pigmented, highly translucent acrylics and gels and in mimicking everything from oil painted trompe l’oeil techniques to woven 17th century textiles, Hodge brings a reconsidered, contemporary perspective to the history and form of painting.

Hodge has completed international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2020), The British School at Rome (2015) and Basso Berlin (2011.) He holds a PhD from the Australian National University Canberra School of Art (2016). His work has been included in exhibitions, in the United Kingdom, Singapore, France, and Australia, and he has been a finalist in numerous prizes including the Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of NSW (2023); Bendigo Art Gallery’s Arthur Guy Memorial Prize (2019); The Geelong Art Prize (2018); and the Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of NSW (2016) (2017). His work is held in a number of permanent collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The Wollongong Art Gallery, The A.C.T Legislative Assembly, and the Australian National University.

Irfan Hendrian is an artist, industrial printmaker, and graphic designer known for his formal explorations in abstraction. Working mainly with paper, his interest is in the Bauhaus approach and method: to reduce, subtract, and simplify everything to its most sublime, essential, and substantial state.

Irfan Hendrian has consistently explored and pushed paper’s formal qualities, as well as its sculptural potential. In his hands, paper is no longer merely a planar support for representation; it becomes both pigment and canvas, shaped into objects and installations that have grown in intricacy and scale over the course of Hendrian’s artistic practice.

Hendrian values efficient, logical, and utilitarian modes of thinking and acting which are reflected directly in his work. Collage provides a methodology that maintains Hendrian’s purist approach to materials, utilizing paper as a raw material with sculptural capabilities. Rather than creating images, he believes that through composing a visual arrangement of objects, a particular aesthetic value emerges.

He has held several solo shows, these include Incognito at the Arts House, Singapore (2024), Incognito at Art Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia (2022); Constructed _scape at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore (2020); Some Other Matter at Aloft at Hermes, Singapore (2019); SANS, at

Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore (2018); Terenne at Jeonbuk Museum of Art, South Korea (2016). Hendrian’s works are in the in the collection of Deutsche Bank (Germany), Jeonbuk Museum of Art (South Korea), Museum MACAN (Indonesia), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), and Tumurun Museum (Indonesia).

Lives and works in Bandung, Indonesia
Born 1987 Bandung, Indonesia

Dawn Ng is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, who has worked across a breadth of mediums, motifs, and scales, including sculpture, photography, light, film, collage, painting, and large-scale installations.

Her practice deals with time, memory, and the ephemeral. Often characterized by lyricism and nuanced use of colour, her work has been acquired by the Singapore Art Museum, and exhibited at the Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, the Jeju Biennale (2017), and the Lille3000 art festival, France. She has had solos in Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze New York and the Art Paris Art Fair, and has shown in London, Sydney, Seoul, Shanghai, and Jakarta.

Ng has been commissioned by the Hermès Foundation (2016), the ArtScience Museum (2019), the Asian Civilisations Museum (2020), and most recently by the National Gallery Singapore (2023) and the UBS Art Collection to create an immersive installation for the UBS Lounge at the inaugural ART SG (2023). In 2024 Dawn was be included in the prestigious Asia Pacific Triennial held at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Australia with a work from her ongoing series Into Air.

Her works are collected by public and private collections, including the Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Morgan Stanley, and UBS Art Collection.

BORN

Lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Born 1992 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

The paintings of Enggar Rhomadioni are indexical forms of biographical and quotidian objects related to one’s memory. By investigating the histories and narratives of these objects, Rhomadioni’s works employ artistic juxtaposition meant to provoke conversations within ourselves and others.

Rhomadioni views the idea of memory as something that is emotional, rather than just an intellectually organized database or archive. Through materials and objects, one understands oneself, thus, Rhomadioni’s works offer the idea of ‘intersubjectivity’, where the objects in his paintings prompt our basic ability to recognize ourselves through others and to connect with the painter’s experience.

Enggar Rhomadioni currently lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He has taken part in group exhibitions including Use Your Illusion, Edwin’s Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (2020); Convergence, Gajah Gallery, Singapore (2019); Kontraksi: Pasca Tradisionalisme (2019), National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia. Rhomadioni has also held several solo exhibitions, including Kanda Laya (2023) at Kiniko Art Room, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and KALABENDA (2021), at Ace House Collective, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Lives and works in Sydney, Australia
Born 1977 in Sydney, Australia

Alex Seton lives and works in Sydney, Australia. While his practice includes photography, video, augmented reality and installation, Seton is best known for marble carving, and frequently exploits our cultural assumptions about the forms of European classical sculpture to examine the underpinnings and anxieties of contemporary life.

Seton’s studio practice has investigated the relationship between the individual and society, with a particular interest in the power structures that determine our attitudes and behaviour and affect our choices. This can take the form of explicit political commentary, whether on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers (in Refoulement, 2014, Someone Else’s Problem, 2015, and The Island, 2017), or on government surveillance and displays of overt power (Elegy on Resistance, 2012 and Panoply, 2007). But Seton often also examines our expectations about cultural forms and traditions such as memorialisation, to question how we determine what has value and deserves to be recollected and valorised. This enquiry has critiqued the form and processes of art and materiality itself (Roughing Out, 2013, Cargo, 2018 and Once There, 2019), but also includes reflections on the reliability of personal memory and its role in the construction of the self and identity (Meet me Under the Dome, 2020, A History of Forgetting, 2022 and Permanent Good Stream, Some Rocks, 2022).

Seton has exhibited in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, the Canberra Public Art Festival, and Kunstenfestival Watou, Belgium, and in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Fremantle Arts Centre, the Samstag Museum in Adelaide, and multiple regional galleries across Australia. He was the first Australian artist to win the Sovereign Asian Art Award in 2020 and was awarded the Mordant Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 2019. He also won the Contemporary Talents Prize at the Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, France in 2017.

In 2021, the Australian War Memorial awarded Seton the major Sufferings of War and Service commission for his work Every Drop Shed in Anguish, which opened in the Sculpture Garden in 2024. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, Australian War Memorial, Newcastle Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, the Danish Royal Art Collection, Copenhagen and numerous other private and public collections.