Earlier this month, I found myself winding through the sensory kaleidoscope that is Sydney Contemporary. Light bouncing off mirrors, bronzes gleaming, canvases competing quietly, conversations rising and fading. It is part visual marathon, part social endurance test, where instinct becomes the best guide. You pause where something insists, circle back when curiosity strikes, and lean in when work holds you. These are the ones that would not let go.

1.

Julie Rrap’s Carapace 6 (2024) at Roslyn Oxley9 is cast from her own back. Yes, her back. Bronze, veined, patinated. This work is both armour and intimacy. It reminds us that our bodies betray us constantly, keeping score of time, touch, and memory, while still managing to look beautiful mounted on a wall.

2. 

Tom Polo’s slow ghost (the begin again) (2025) felt like a mirror that knows too much. Paint swirls over the mirrored surface, so you see yourself folded into the work. Eyes echoing, form dissolving. It’s playful, unsettling, deeply human.

3.

Over at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Lester-prize winner, Taryn Gill’s Limber (Self Portrait in Relief) (2023) manages to fold a body into itself while still meeting your gaze. It is at once an embrace and a fracture, a portrait that refuses to behave.

4. 

Finally, at Sullivan + Strumpf, Yang Yongliang’s Phantom Metropolis (2024) looks like a classical ink landscape until you realise the mountains are made of skyscrapers. It is haunted by progress. It is beautiful. It is warning.

5.

Julia Gutman’s textile works, stitched from worn fabrics and slept-in sheets, felt like memory in motion. Frayed seams, imperfect edges, portraits held together by gesture. They are less about resolution and more about what lives between the stitches.

ADC XX