SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 2025
11-14 September2025
Hugo Michell Gallery is proud to present new works by four of Australia’s most engaging contemporary painters; Richard Lewer, William Mackinnon, Georgia Spain, and Garawan Wanambi. This curated presentation explores connections between personal narratives, memory, and the Australian landscape through diverse material practices.
PREVIEW CATALOGUE
RICHARD LEWER
Based in Melbourne, Richard Lewer exhibits regularly in Australia and New Zealand. He is known for his video and animation, paintings, and delicately beautiful drawings, which evocatively rework some of life’s less pleasant elements – crime, illness, religion, personal disasters, horror movies and extreme events. The work is accessible and familiar, with a critical edge that probes what is beautiful and sinister about our society without injecting a moralising tone or political message.
Lewer has exhibited widely in Australia and New Zealand, and has been a multiple-time finalist in notable prizes like The Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman Prizes, Mosman Art Prize and winner of the Basil Sellers Art Award (2016) and Paul Guest Prize (2020). His work is held in collections; such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Sydney Modern, Auckland Art Gallery, and many others.
WILLIAM MACKINNON
William Mackinnon (b. 1978, Melbourne) lives and works between Ibiza, the UK, and Australia. Mackinnon’s landscape paintings are what the artist calls ‘psychological landscapes’, drawing on personal experience of the world he inhabits. They are works of memory and discovery, of the familiar and the unknown – combining the real and the imaginary to transform everyday experiences from mundane to an enigmatic other. Guided by recurring motifs of the road with all its cracks and potholes; of headlights and reflecting street signs, Mackinnon’s work plays on oppositions – light and darkness; comfort and threat; that which is deeply personal, yet profoundly universal.
His works are held in Australian and International private and public collections, most notably The National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, and Art Gallery of South Australia.
GEORGIA SPAIN
Georgia Spain is a visual artist and musician living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). She graduated with a BFA in painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2015, where she was the recipient of the Lionel Gell Foundation Scholarship and a finalist for the Margaret Lawrence Gallery's Majlis Travelling Scholarship. In 2020, Spain was the recipient of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
In 2021, Spain's work Six Different Women (2021) won the Trawalla Foundation Acquisitive Prize in the Women's Art Prize Tasmania. In the same year, Spain was announced as winner of the Sir John Sulman Prize for her work, Getting down or falling up (2021).
Her work often explores the complexities of human behaviour; using narrative and storytelling to examine the cultural, political and personal. Her paintings frequently look at ideas around human spectacle, theatricality, ritual and ceremony. She is interested in the emotional and performative exchanges between people in social and psychological spaces and in her paintings physical connection is explored through bodies in groupings.
GARAWAN WANAMBI
Born in 1965, Garawan Wanambi belongs to Marrakulu clan and works out of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Northern Arhem Land. After his father's death in 1973, Garawan was brought up by a Marrangu leader, Yanggariny Wunungmurra, and adopted to the Marrangu clan. Through this connection, Garawan paints Marrangu designs, the counterpart of Marrakulu from the other side of Arnhem Bay. Garawan and his family continue to live and work at Gängan, to the south of Yirrkala, and he has emerged as one of the most gifted of the new generation of artists based there.
Garawan extends the history and practice of Yolŋu painting. Whilst continuing to use natural pigments and rarrk (crosshatching), he extends the possibilities of these methods through the mixing of natural pigments to form unique colours and deliberate tonal variations. His precise geometry and complex layering of designs create a depth of field on an otherwise flattened surface and a mesmerising optical effect. In doing this, Wanambi explores the Yolŋu concept of Buwayak ‒ simultaneously making elements both visible and invisible.
He was a finalist in the Telstra Art Prize in 2009, 2014, 2020, and a finalist in the Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2013. In 2014 he was awarded the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award Best Bark painting prize.
Garawan has works held in a number of significant collections; Kerry Stokes Larrakitj Collection, The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (USA), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Charles Darwin University Art Collection, Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Museum of Australia, Monash University Art Museum Collection. His works are also held in private collection both nationally and internationally.