Somewhere Between Real and Imagined : Curatorial+Co. at Sydney Contemporary
Image credit: Curatorial+Co. Team. Courtesy of Curatorial+Co.
What happens when a landscape begins to slip out of focus? When a familiar place becomes a half-remembered one, where history, memory and imagination bleed into one another?
For Sydney Contemporary, Curatorial+Co. brings together André de Vanny, Lynn Savery, Dr Saffron Newey and Eugenie Kawabata in a presentation that treats landscape less as a fixed geography than as a psychological space. Across paintings and sculpture, forests become uncanny, figures appear and recede, digital images are reimagined, and discarded materials take on new lives.
There is something deliberately unstable about the resulting landscape. De Vanny’s scarred and weathered surfaces carry the memory of Country and childhood; Savery constructs dreamlike worlds from fragments of culture and memory; Newey collapses art history into the strange democracy of the internet; while Kawabata transforms industrial remnants into imagined forms drawn from the ancient Takayna Rainforest.
Together, the works ask us to look twice and perhaps to question what, exactly, we are looking at. VAULT spoke with Curatorial+Co. about the artists, materials and ideas behind the presentation, and the fertile territory that emerges when the real begins to give way to the imagined.
What led you to choose this set of artists for your Sydney Contemporary presentation?
Each year, we approach the fair as an opportunity to create something unexpected: a fresh booth that introduces artists and ideas we believe deserve a wider audience. This year, we bring together four artists who push landscape beyond the familiar. Across their work, landscape becomes something fluid and psychologically charged: a space where history and the present collide with imagined futures, and where the human figure emerges as a quiet, sometimes uncanny presence. Together, the works invite us to consider landscape not simply as something we look at, but as something we inhabit, remember and imagine.
The works move between the familiar and the surreal. What do you hope people feel when they are immersed in your booth?
We hope people feel a little unmoored – in a good way. Each of these landscapes is recognisable enough to draw you in, but there's always something to unsettle that familiarity. We want visitors to move through the booth the way you would move through a half-remembered place, where the boundary between what’s observed and what’s imagined starts to blur. If people leave feeling like they've stepped into an after-image, or into their own subconscious, we've done our job.
Image credit: André de Vanny, Roll Cage, 2025, acrylic conte, chalk, pastel, willow, compressed charcoal on salvaged paper, 170 x 266cm. Courtesy of the artist and Curatorial+Co.
André de Vanny’s works hold a very intimate and personal touch. How does this manifest in his work?
André’s paintings draw from his childhood on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria, which is clear in his chosen palette of ochre, earth reds and deep blues. His recent return to the figure draws on experiences accumulated throughout his adult life, particularly the ways in which violent histories depicted through visual culture permeate our collective consciousness in the present. His figurative works, many of which will be on show at the fair, are not didactic; rather, they blur the distinctions between sacred narrative and contemporary experience.
De Vanny uses a wide range of processes staining, folding, sanding and exposing his works to the elements. How do these processes show up in the finished works?
These processes show up most clearly in the textural, almost hide-like surfaces of the work, built up through staining, folding, stitching, and sanding. Exposure to the elements allows the pigment to evaporate and scar the surface over time. Materially, his works reflect the rugged landscape of his upbringing, holding both the abundance of youth and the melancholy of drought.
Image credit: Lynn Savery, Duet VI, 2025, oil on canvas, 40 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Curatorial+Co.
Lynn Savery’s paintings often include figures within mysterious or dreamlike landscapes. Who are these figures, and what role do they play in the worlds she creates?
Lynn Savery’s ideas rarely come from one clear source – they emerge from a collision of memories and dreams, a line of poetry, a piece of music, a scene from a film, a passage from a book. Out of these fragments, she builds worlds that feel as though they once existed, or perhaps never did. The figures within them are the first explorers of these landscapes, and the bridge between that world and the viewer.
There is often a sense of mystery in Savery’s paintings. How does she build these worlds and draw the viewer into them?
I recall Lynn recounting the sound of Degas whispering in her ear: “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness and some fantasy. When you make your meaning plain, you end up boring people.” Essentially, her aim is to create work that adds up to something beyond its components, drawing the eye, or perhaps the mind, toward an elusive story that takes you somewhere yet remains incomplete. Like a fragmented dream, the work is meant to make you feel or sense something that cannot easily be defined.
Image credit: Saffron Newey, Diana and the nostalgic horse, 2026, oil on linen, 58x45cm
Saffron Newey draws on images from the internet, digital archives and art history. How does this way of collecting images influence her paintings?
Saffron Newey is fascinated by the miscellaneous structure of the internet: how historical artworks have become disconnected from timelines, movements and makers. A coveted “masterpiece” can easily appear in the same search results as fantasy art, AI and stock imagery. This flattening of history, hierarchy and provenance is summoned in her paintings, which both pay homage to and critique these pictorial genres.
Her paintings are planned to a certain point, built from handmade and digitally collaged references. As narratives begin to emerge in the work, the painting is often adjusted: figures are added, sections wiped out. The anticipation that comes with this changeable methodology is much like an internet search: a labyrinth of possibility.
What changes when an image that began digitally becomes a physical painting?
This is a question with a multitude of answers. Saffron resists the didactic “look and put” practice of simply copying a digital image. When creating digital collage references, she deliberately leaves herself space for painterly play and chance. Sometimes she works from highly pixelated, blurred or filtered images, forcing herself to reinvent the picture.
The painting process itself needs some haptic energy. Often, she will paint a detail and then drag a large, oily brush through it; other times she wipes it out. It can be terrifying, but these interventions are precisely the excitement, the "frisson" of painting.
Having said this, the paintings still carry the legacies of their digital referents. Working with very thin layers of glaze results in a surface quality as smooth as a computer screen. In select works, she makes her own oil paints from powdered fluorescent pigments, resulting in the colour saturation of glowing pixels.
Image credit: Eugenie Kawabata, Botanica Exotica Strange Strange Garden 6, 2026, reclaimed textiles, acrylic bead, resin, acrylic paint dye composition, foil leaf, 59.5x26x26cm. Courtesy of the artist and Curatorial+Co.
Eugenie Kawabata uses discarded industrial textiles to create sculptures inspired by Tasmania’s Takayna Rainforest. What first drew her to this landscape?
Eugenie Kawabata first visited Takayna on walking trips and was drawn to its ancient, wild and almost otherworldly landscape. Camping there this year with the Bob Brown Foundation deepened that connection, immersing her in its intense weather, extraordinary forms and constant cycles of growth, decay and regeneration.
What does the material Kawabata works with bring to the work and aid in her exploration of the rainforest?
Eugenie transforms discarded textiles through stitching, dyeing and painting before stabilising them with resin – turning something soft and destined for landfill into something rigid and enduring. The material allows her to explore transformation, growth and decay while creating unfamiliar forms that sit somewhere between natural specimens and imagined artefacts.
Each artist approaches landscape in such different ways. What do you think starts to emerge when their works are seen together?
Landscape, within each artist’s own visual and material language, is suspended between the conscious and the subconscious. What starts to emerge is a shared sense that landscape is never simply observed; it is remembered, imagined and reconstructed. When encountered together, each artist’s approach seems to dissolve the boundary between the real and the imagined landscape. Each artist works with different materials and processes, yet all four treat landscape as unstable ground, shaped as much by memory and imagination as by geography itself. What emerges is less a single vision of landscape than a shared preoccupation with how landscape is felt, constructed and carried through us long after the empirical experience has passed.
Was there a particular work or moment in the selection that helped shape the direction of the booth?
It was less about one particular work and more about the moment when we started to see a conversation emerge between the artists. There was a shared sense of landscape as something more than a physical place: it held emotion, tension and imagination. The figure also kept appearing in interesting ways, sometimes central, sometimes almost disappearing into the landscape. Once we saw those threads connecting the works, the direction of the booth became very clear.
For someone visiting Sydney Contemporary and encountering these artists for the first time, what would you encourage them to spend time with, or to keep at the forefront of their mind as they enter your booth?
Slow down, spend time in the space and let the figures reveal themselves to you; they tend to emerge at the edges or from behind a veil of obscurity. Notice the materials, too: what appears to be one thing is often another. These works reward a second look more than a first.
Curatorial+Co.
Booth E02
Sydney Contemporary 2026
Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh NSW
3 – 6 September 2026
sydneycontemporary.com.au
