Born 1971, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

After the devastating 2019-20 bushfires in NSW, Lara Merrett cultivated deep connections with her local community and industry peers, which continue to strengthen and thrive in her colour field abstract paintings that respond to space and place.

Merrett’s practice interrogates the relationship between painting and its surrounding architecture with site-specific work that invites us to enter and navigate its folds. Merrett’s larger scale commissioned work has involved public participation through touch, movement, cuttings, and its relationship to the built environment. Her simultaneous agility, amplification and softening of the rigid confines of canvas and gallery both complicate and honor painterly traditions.

Born 1988, Colombo Sri-Lanka
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Outrageous and audacious, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s ceramic sculptures look to ancient histories of iconoclasm, extracting and reframing our relationship with religious iconographies and artefacts.

Nithiyendran is interested in global histories and languages of figurative representation and their intersections with issues relating to the politics of idolatry, the monument, gender, race and religiosity. He has specific interests in South Asian forms and imagery. While he is best known for his inventive and somewhat unorthodox approach to ceramic media, his material vernacular is broad as evidenced by the works presented at Melbourne Art Fair 2024.

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

Gregory Hodge disguises art historical vignettes within his frame of personal references, influenced by his lived experiences and surrounding environment of Paris. Layering rich and complex compositions, his paintings mimic the warp and weft of 17th century tapestries displayed in the Louvre.

Hodge's paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, layering personal source material with painterly gestural marks and obscured motifs of foliage, interiors and architecture. With an ongoing interest in how to render different material surfaces in paint, Hodge’s recent works eschew a slick, pop finish for a deliberately handmade quality designed to resemble the warp and weft of tapestries and other woven materials.

Born 1993
Lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia

Following her momentus win of the 2023 Archibald Prize and her most ambitious tableau to date in Primavera (2022) at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Julia Gutman showcases intricate textile works that blur the line between the personal and historical, capturing intimate memories with her loved ones.

The work is made almost entirely out of clothing worn and donated by the artist’s friends and family; their personal traces imbued in each garment become a significant thematic constituent. Ambitious by nature and rigorous in process, the artist diligently stitches together the materials by machine and by hand, simultaneously rendering detailed figures amid a chorus of various fabrics and textures.