Sydney Contemporary Thurs at Carriageworks

I went along last week to see the show having kindly received a ticket from Rochelle Summerfield, a Northern Rivers artist. I actually saw her at her booth but she was talking with someone else so I didn’t have a chance to say thank you.

I did get around to a lot of other booths, including Tezukayama Osaka, who were featuring Mitsumasa Kadota (see image below). His colourful paintings seemed to have been made with a palette knife sloshing vast quantities of oil paint around. They’re amazing.

Mars Gallery from Melbourne (see below) had some bright neon works, some of which were on the walls and some of which were on plinths. There were other electrified works, some things made by a Japanese artist that were entirely mechanical with words being made out of bicycle chains. I talked a bit about these with mark a friend who I met at the show and he wondered aloud how you’d deal with such a work if it broke down and needed repair. I said that the traditional methods are more reliable.

As you can see (pic below) there were crowds of people attending, it was still light when I arrived but it was dark by the time I left. I sort of meandered my way through the connected rooms and I think I saw everything but the show is so enormous it’s impossible to know if I did.

I really liked Jacqui Meng’s oil paintings at Stanley Street Gallery, they are bright and playful and poppy, right up my alley. Priced reasonably too I wondered if Meng had studied at the National Art School. The colours are fantastic, I love the combination of green and orange in this work (‘playing pool’ is 106cm by 113cm).

I was almost tempted to buy by the APY Art Centre Collective upon seeing Jeannie Minunga and Kay Finn’s wonderful abstract, but the size (2m square) was daunting because I knew it wouldn’t fit up the second staircase in my house and I need something that will get up to the studio on the second floor.