The Art of Elsewhere: Michael Reid’s Sydney - Berlin Takeover of Sydney Contemporary 2026.

For Sydney Contemporary’s 10th edition, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin brings more than 20 artists to Carriageworks in a presentation that asks an increasingly interesting question: what happens when Australian art stops explaining where it comes from and starts talking to the world?

Australia has always had an awkward relationship with distance.

For artists, it has been both subject and inconvenience: An enormous continent at the end of the cultural map, its landscapes so distinctive they risk becoming clichés, its artists periodically required to travel halfway around the planet before anyone overseas takes notice.

That geography is changing.

At the 10th edition of Sydney Contemporary, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin presents more than 20 artists across painting, sculpture, photography and installation. But the interesting proposition is not that this is a survey of Australian art. It is that the artists gathered here demonstrate just how impossible a single definition of “Australian” has become.

Landscape, migration, memory, the body, ornament and perception become different routes into the same larger conversation.

Sydney and Berlin are simply two of the coordinates.

Painting, particularly landscape painting, has been pronounced obsolete often enough to qualify for a pension. Yet it persists, perhaps because the landscape has never really been about scenery.

Tim Maguire’s new paintings demonstrate why. Exhibiting at Sydney Contemporary with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin for the first time following the announcement of his representation, Maguire brings decades of experimentation with the image into expansive works that hover between landscape, botanical fantasy and abstraction.

From a distance, they can resolve into impossible vistas or luxuriant floral worlds. Move closer and the apparent image breaks apart into colour, luminosity and sensation.

It recalls something Jorge Luis Borges understood instinctively: The closer we get to certainty, the stranger the territory becomes.

Sid Pattni approaches the question of place through history rather than geography. His work explores diasporic identity and the afterlife of empire, following his Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris, awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and his solo exhibition Curiosities at Michael Reid Berlin.

Here, history is not safely behind glass. It leaks.

That makes Pattni particularly significant within the Sydney- Berlin dialogue. Both cities are places where migration and historical memory have become part of the contemporary landscape, albeit in very different ways.

Australia, apparently, has decided the bottom of the map was getting a little too predictable.

Stephanie Tabram, newly represented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin, takes another route into place. Her Tasmanian landscapes are painstakingly constructed from ultrafine marks, yet they never feel merely photographic. Light, foliage, water and weather become psychological conditions.

Tasmania, in Tabram's hands, is not a view. It has moods.

Julz Beresford and Carly Le Cerf similarly treat landscape as lived experience rather than picturesque inventory. Beresford returns repeatedly to the Hawkesbury River and Snowy Monaro ranges; Le Cerf looks towards the monumental terrain of Australia's interior, using gestural force, texture and earth-heavy colour to convey both scale and intimacy.

Their work suggests that the Australian landscape does not need to be monumental to be powerful. It only needs to be looked at long enough.

John Honeywill makes the world smaller.

His still lifes take ordinary objects, i.e. sweets, flowers, vessels, fruit, and give them an almost suspicious degree of attention. Everything is meticulously controlled: Light, atmosphere, composition, surface.

The result is quietly uncanny.

Honeywill's current exhibition Lean Towards runs at Michael Reid Sydney from 6 August to 5 September, coinciding with Sydney Contemporary, where he will also participate in an official offsite talk.

His paintings belong to the long tradition of still life, but they also have something distinctly contemporary about them. In an age in which our attention is relentlessly monetised, Honeywill makes attention itself the subject.

Nothing is happening.

And that is precisely what makes you look.

Kathy Liu takes the opposite approach, allowing things to happen that do not appear to have existed before. Following her solo exhibition Odyssey at Michael Reid Sydney and recent recognition through the Fisher's Ghost Art Award and Waverley Art Prize, Liu returns with paintings in which translucent layers of colour gradually disclose figures, structures and ambiguous worlds.

They seem less painted than excavated.

There is a useful tension here between control and accident. Liu's images feel as though the artist has established the conditions and then allowed the painting to make some of the decisions.

A reasonable arrangement, frankly.

The three sculptural practices presented by Michael Reid are united by a healthy suspicion of sculpture's traditional solemnity.

Troy Emery introduces feathers into his soft-sculptural animal forms, extending his ongoing dialogue between sculpture, textile, natural history and decorative craft.

His creatures are part specimen, part fantasy and part beautifully over-dressed hallucination.

That exuberance matters. For centuries, monumental sculpture has been burdened with seriousness — marble, bronze, heroic bodies, heroic men. Emery introduces softness, ornament, beadwork, silk-like threads and feathers, allowing craft and decoration to occupy territory from which art history has periodically tried to exclude them.

The sculpture is not less serious for being playful.

It is simply less pompous.

Mai Nguyễn-Long is interested in the body at its least decorous. Her Vomit Girl sculptures transform visceral bodily experience into an expressive language for diasporic identity and experiences that are difficult to make articulate through conventional representation.

The series was acquired in its entirety by the Art Gallery of New South Wales following last year's fair. Nguyễn-Long has also recently undertaken major projects including a commission for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, now in the QAGOMA Collection. She is currently undertaking a three-month residency at Moly-Sabata in France before presenting new work at the 18th Lyon Biennale this September.

The apparent grotesquerie of the work is therefore something of a trap. What initially confronts the viewer as bodily excess becomes a way of discussing belonging, memory and displacement.

The abject, it turns out, has an excellent memory.

Linde Ivimey works with bone, wax, fabric, metal and hair to create figures that seem to belong to an archaeological record from an alternate civilisation. Their faces are often absent, yet their gestures are unmistakably human.

They are tender and unsettling in equal measure.

If the face is normally our shortcut to recognition, Ivimey removes the shortcut and leaves us with posture, material and gesture. Her figures become strangely intimate precisely because they refuse to explain themselves.

This is where Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin becomes more interesting than a gallery simply assembling a booth for an art fair.

The gallery's Sydney and Berlin locations create a physical axis between Australia and Europe, while its broader programs - including Michael Reid CLAY, Michael Reid Object, Michael Reid LAND and the travelling Beyond project - extend its interest in taking Australian art beyond conventional gallery walls. The gallery currently operates from Sydney and Berlin and describes Beyond as a moveable offsite exhibition platform.

That matters because Australian art no longer needs to behave as an export.

It can be part of the conversation from the beginning.

Sydney Contemporary itself has become an important meeting point for that conversation. Its 2026 edition brings more than 100 galleries and 500 artists to Carriageworks, alongside talks, performances and installations.

Carriageworks is an especially appropriate setting. The former railway workshops were built for movement: things arrived, things departed, materials were transformed. An art fair now occupies the same architecture, replacing locomotives with paintings, sculpture and the occasional collector trying to look as though they have not fallen in love with something before asking its price.

The metaphor almost writes itself.

Almost.

Michael Reid's presentation is strongest when considered as a series of movements rather than a national showcase.

Maguire destabilises perception. Pattni interrogates inheritance. Tabram, Beresford and Le Cerf reconsider landscape as lived experience. Honeywill makes attention feel radical. Liu allows abstraction to remain uncertain. Emery gives sculpture permission to enjoy itself. Nguyễn-Long turns bodily discomfort into a language of belonging. Ivimey makes the human figure feel newly mysterious.

What connects them is not style.

It is curiosity.

And that may be the more useful definition of contemporary Australian art: Not a look, but an appetite for examining what appears familiar until it becomes strange again.

Sydney Contemporary's tenth edition arrives at a moment when the art world is simultaneously becoming more global and more interested in questions of origin, identity, material and place. Michael Reid's answer is refreshingly unsentimental.

Don't choose between local and international.

Move between them.

Sydney. Berlin. Tasmania. Paris. Lyon. The Hawkesbury. The interior. An invented landscape. A feathered animal. A body that refuses to behave.

The old antipodes were measured in kilometres.

The new ones are measured in ideas.

Sydney Contemporary 2026 runs from 3-6 September at Carriageworks, with the Collector / VIP Preview on 2 September.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Michael Reid Gallery.