Born Townsville, 1981
Lives and works in Meanjin/Brisbane, QLD

Tony Albert is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists with a longstanding interest in the cultural misrepresentation of Aboriginal people. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, his multidisciplinary practice considers the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses crucial questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

Born 1987
Lives and works in lutruwita (Tasmania, Australia)

Marion Abraham is a painter living and working in lutruwita (Tasmania, Australia) who investigates inner workings of the self.

Born 1972
Lives and works between Sydney and Broughton, NSW

Glenn Barkley is an artist, writer, curator and gardener based in Sydney and Berry, NSW, Australia. His work operates in the space between these interests drawing upon the history of ceramics, popular song, the garden and conversations about art and the internet.

Born 1979
Lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Seth Birchall’s paintings conjure meditative worlds that pulse with colour and life. His fictitious landscapes—composed from found photographs as well as sketches and memories of Australia and Bali—reflect a biophilic urge to connect with other life forms in nature. Drawing inspiration from a wealth of rich and unexpected sources, including romantic notions of landscape throughout art history, Birchall offers a contemporary twist on the gestural brushwork, moody light, and colour play of Expressionism and Impressionism.

Born 1959
Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Polly Borland’s practice has seen her expand and trouble the portraiture genre using both photography and soft sculpture. Borland’s surreal imaginings, equally strange and compelling, revel in the playful potentialities of composition and the body. The artist’s soft sculptural experimentations are used as adornment and shelter for her sitter, elsewhere they morph into their own subjects entirely. Famed for her early editorial work and portraiture—which saw her photograph the likes of Queen Elizabeth II, Nick Cave, Donald Trump, Susan Sontag, Monica Lewinsky and Cate Blanchett for a host of clients such as The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, Borland is one of Australia’s most internationally recognisable contemporary artists.

Born 1987
Lives and works in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia

Sam Cranstoun's practice is largely concerned with contemporary image culture and its bearing on our understanding of the past. Working across a wide range of media and prompted by his many research interests, Cranstoun takes an alternate approach that offers a broad view and sheds light on lesser-known stories of our fellow man.

Born 1980
Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia

Yvette Coppersmith is a painter specialising in both portraiture and abstraction. While her painting practice originally formed through portraiture in the realist tradition, over the last 20 years her visual language has developed and evolved to include still life and abstraction, with an interest in the interplay between these genres and the figure.

Born 1962
Lives and works in Thirroul, 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.

Born 1974
Lives and works in Singapore

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.

Born 1993
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney

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.

Born 1977
Lives and works in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia

Natalya Hughes' multidisciplinary practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.

Born in Adelaide, 1973
Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Sam Leach’s works are informed by the canon of art history, science, and philosophy. His work is an ongoing investigation of the relationship between humans, machines and animals. His most recent bodies of work incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) fusing the tropes and gestures of paintings with the mechanics and gaze of the future.

He is currently artist in residence at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, researching how AI might activate museological collections within a social context.

Born 1954
Lives and works in Nyangbul/Ballina, Australia

Over four decades, Lindy Lee has established herself as one of Australia’s most influential and respected contemporary artists with a practice that explores her Chinese heritage through the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism - principles which emphasise humanity’s intimate and inextricable relationship to nature. Her work investigates the interdependence between spirit and matter, often employing elements of chance to produce works that embody this profound connection with the cosmos.

Born 1973
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Michael Lindeman shines a light on the mechanics of the contemporary art world. Relying on humour as a liberating and disarming tool, he examines relations surrounding class, taste, and power. Lindeman’s work often takes form as large-scale text paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Drifting between stream of consciousness writing and structured research-based content, he aims for a type of wry institutional critique.

Born 1952
Lives and works in Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, Australia

Naminapu Maymuru-White is one of the the first Yolŋu women to be taught to paint miny’tji (sacred creation clan designs), and her works are of historic and continuing significance as a Maŋgalili clan member and contemporary artist in her own right. Her fluid and unrestrained compositions distinguish her as a highly unique and innovative Yolŋu artist.

Born 1988
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Sri-Lankan born, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is a contemporary artist. He 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. He has worked imaginatively with a range of sculptural materials including bronze, concrete, neon, LED and fibreglass.

Born 1971
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Lara 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 honour painterly traditions.

Born 1977
Lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia

While his practice includes photography, video, augmented reality and installation, Alex 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.

Born 1978
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

A process-based approach to painting has led Gemma Smith’s exploration of abstraction for over two decades. She has continually pushed her practice in new directions, approaching painting through a variety of conceptual methodologies. Sometimes, self-imposed boundaries set the terms of compositional games; while at others times she pits intuition and chance against analysis and control. A sense of discovery infiltrates each work, never moving towards a pre-determined composition but harnessing an infectious sense of potentiality. While the method may vary for different bodies of work, the embrace of the pleasure or sensation of painting is key to Smith’s practice.

Born 1980
Lives and works in New York and Shanghai

Born in 1980 in Old Town Jiading, Shanghai, Yang Yongliang studied Chinese painting since childhood. In the early 2000s, he graduated from Shanghai Institute of Design of China Academy of Art and started his experiments in multidisciplinary art. Yang currently lives and works in New York and Shanghai.

Born 1950
Lives and works in Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, Australia

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu is Yolŋu artist of the Gumatj clan, living and working in Yirrkala, North East Arnhemland. Her works are inspired by her knowledge and connection to Makassan traders, the Indonesian fisherman with whom the Yolŋu people had a rich relationship for hundreds of years.