Sydney Contemporary 2025

The National Art School is excited to present the next wave of Australia’s artistic talent at Sydney Contemporary 2025.

Located at Booth J12, we will be showcasing the work of nine emerging artists who have recently graduated from either our Master of Fine Art Program or our Bachelor of Fine Art Program. The diverse exhibition will feature the best examples of painting, drawing, photomedia, ceramics and sculpture that NAS has to offer.

For collectors who are interested in emerging art, young talent, and affordable works, the National Art School is the place to visit.

Please come and join us at the Fair. We would love to show you new work by our extraordinary artists.

EXHIBITION DETAILS:

Thursday 11 – Sunday 14 September 2025

Carriageworks

Booth J12

Jake Bartley
b. 1997, Sydney / Gadigal
Lives and works, Ballarat / Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung

Jake Bartley is Ballarat–based artist who creates paintings that are conceptually grounded in pop culture, specifically animation and cartoon figures. Bartley’s paintings deal with themes of violence, sex, depression and addiction and they consider the role of these themes in contemporary entertainment and consumerism. He predominantly paints on a large scale, bringing pop culture into a fine art environment and blurring the lines between high and low art. Jake Bartley graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting at the National Art School in 2023.

Im at the Root of All Evil, 2025
oil on canvas
195 x 157.5 cm

Christian Bonett
b. 1975, Bath, England
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

Christian Jon Bonett is a multidisciplinary artist and educator living and working on Gadigal land in Eora/ Sydney. He completed a Master of Fine Art in Ceramics at the National Art School in 2023. Bonett incorporates installation, ceramic sculpture, painting, and neon elements in his recent work. His practice explores the vernacular of cars, their owners, roads, signs, and urban architecture. Through playful manipulation of context, Bonett provocatively transforms, distorts, and subverts these everyday objects and spaces, challenging our perceptions of these forms. His work critiques societal constructs of identity, gender, class, consumerism, and environmental concerns.

The G(A)Y team van, 2024
glazed earthenware
48 x 23 x 20 cm

Harrison Chao
b. 2003, Wellington, Aotearoa
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

Harrison Chao is an artist based in Sydney/ Gadigal. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the National Art School in 2024. Chao’s practice investigates the complex interplay between technology, conspiracy theories, media, and mass hysteria. His painting process manipulates imagery found in the dark pockets of modern online culture, using them as vessels that communicate the nature of skepticism through a psychoanalytic lens.

Speaking to an era of fallacy and misdirection, the paintings prioritise richness of meaning over clarity, acting as cryptic, deconstructed depictions of modern hysteria’s entanglement with the conspiratorial mind and its effect on the human psyche. The formal use of soft, pastel colour palettes and minimal paint application sharply contrasts with labyrinthine compositions of dark imagery, echoing the subject matter’s distorted and convoluted nature.

Spectacular Optical, 2024
oil on canvas
110 x 95 cm

Lewis Doherty
b. 1991, Sydney / Gadigal
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

With a commitment to sculpture and working primarily in bronze and aluminium, Lewis Doherty is an artist based in Sydney, Australia. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of NSW and he completed a Master of Fine Art at the National Art School in 2022. Doherty has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2013.

Defined by a fragmentary and sketchlike logic, Doherty’s manner of making seems less inclined toward the confirmation of precise sculptural forms, but rather a process-based, interventionist approach wherein materials, methodologies and form operate in a state of profound reciprocity.

Doherty’s sculptures often directly articulate the operational language of how they have been cast, shaped, coloured and made upright, like fraught and poetic monuments to a contingent and un-knowable material reality.

Carriage/Study for a Pattern, 2025
bronze, casting remnants
30 x 23.1 x 17 cm
unique

Isabella Kennedy
b. 1989, Sydney / Gadigal
Jawoyn and Dagoman
Lives and works, Sydney / Gadigal

Isabella Kennedy is a multidisciplinary artist of Jawoyn, Dagoman and Anglo-Australian (Scottish, Irish, and English) descent. With an expanded printmaking practice that incorporates sculpture, photography, moving image, and installation, her work explores familial grief and processes of remembrance that aim to contest colonial narratives.

Kennedy holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking (2022) and a Master of Fine Art (2024) from the National Art School, Sydney. She is a current finalist in the Mackay Artspace Libris Awards.

swaddle/shroud, 2024
inkjet print on Epson matte
44 x 29.5 cm
edition of 3

Rachel Mackay
b. 1988, London, England
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

Rachel Mackay is a multidisciplinary Australian artist whose work spans painting, sculpture and moving-image. Central to her work is the female body – most often her own – used as both subject and medium. The body becomes a shifting site; simultaneously personal and collective, knowable and unknowable, human and other. Through this lens, Mackay explores identity and embodiment as fluid and permeable. Mackay has been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize (2022, 2024) and the 2025 Environmental Art & Design Prize. Her MFA work at the National Art School (2024) was featured in Art Collector magazine.

Born in London, Mackay moved to Sydney in 1999 and later lived in Copenhagen from 2011 to 2016. She holds a Bachelor of Design from the University of Sydney and completed a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School in 2024. She currently lives and works on Gadigal Land. Rachel Mackay has been selected as an artist in residence at the Woollahra Gallery for 2026.

Chimera 7, 2025
oil on canvas
91.4 x 61 cm

Megan McKenzie
b. 1982, Brisbane / Meanjin
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

Megan McKenzie is a Sydney-based artist who engages with methods and materials that allow us to reconfigure awareness. Working primarily with clay and glaze, she employs universally recognisable structures, such as spheres, to create reduced forms that require the viewer to draw on their own life experiences to attribute meaning. Her aim is to create objects and experiences that speak subconsciously to the individual and challenge our perceptions of the world around us, by investigating how light, refraction, form, space, colour and texture interact to behave as a signifier.

McKenzie graduated with a BFA from the National Art School in 2025, receiving the Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. She is a 2025 Art Incubator grant recipient and is working towards her forthcoming solo exhibition at CBD Gallery. McKenzie has exhibited in several group shows in regional galleries and was a finalist in the 2024 Muswellbrook Art Prize.

Float, 2024
raku, stoneware and textured glazes
70 x 30 x 30 cm (ceramics pieces only, height for suspension is variable)

Johanna Ng
b. 1990, Sydney / Gadigal
Lives and works, Sydney / Dharug

Johanna Ng lives and works on unceded Dharug land (Sydney). Across photography, moving image, installation and performance, she scrutinises how images percolate through individual and collective consciousness to emerge as embodied actions, cultural mimicry, and performances of self. Her practice experiments with imaging technologies to test their limits of reproduction and truth-telling, while implementing strategies of trickery and refusal to activate an oppositional gaze.

Ng holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School (2022) where she received the Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. She has participated as a finalist in multiple prizes and was the recipient of the 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and the 2023 Burwood Art Prize. Her first solo exhibition was exhibited at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art as part of their 2024 4A LAB Emerging Artists Exhibition program. In 2025, she received the Ian Potter Cultural Trust’s Emerging Artists Grant to undertake a residency at the Koganecho Artist-in-Residence Program, Japan.

a man holding a camera walks with a woman in front of an advertisement for carte bradesco, 2024
from the series Every Asian in Sex and the City
inkjet print on clear film, inkjet print on cotton rag
80.5 x 59.4 cm

Taylor Steel
b. 1999, Sydney / Gadigal
Lives and works Sydney / Gadigal

Taylor Steel has exhibited with galleries including Minerva and Artereal Gallery, as well as numerous artist-run spaces. In 2022 she completed a Master of Fine Art majoring in printmaking at the National Art School where she was awarded the Bird Holcomb Master of Fine Art Scholarship. Most recently she has been a finalist in the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize (2025) and the Canberra Contemporary Photo Prize (2025).

Working within an expanded print and photo-based practice, Steel examines decay and disorder in the marginal, overgrown, and uncanny spaces that exist in the gaps and peripheries of urban landscapes. Steel’s practice ranges from representational photography to abstracted images, utilising analogue and digital copying and distortion processes. Decay is approached not only as a subject encountered in the field but also as a methodology – enabling a departure from the indexical photograph to the abstracted and degraded image.

gathering dust, 2024
polycarbonate, epoxy resin, toner, acetate, enamel, aluminium composite panel and stainless steel, aluminium frame
31 x 25.5 cm