Ashlee Becks is an exciting emerging artist who has recently become represented by Artereal Gallery. In 2020, Ashlee won the Emerging Artist Award at the Brisbane Portrait Prize and in 2021, was selected as a finalist for the Brett Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship. An artist to watch, Ashlee has completed two residencies across Australia and been recognised by Arts Queensland.

Ashlee Becks will present a showstopping body of paintings for Sydney Contemporary, contemplating the emotional symbolism of gifting flowers; a gesture of nurture that can be for oneself or for another. Utilising a palette knife to apply thick impasto gestures in oil paint, the made-of-many-marks surfaces of Ashlee Becks’ works are densely textured and quilt-like. Ashlee Becks’ dense and layered flower paintings are metaphors for moods and the cycle of joy and loss in life and in nature.

Patrizia Biondi has developed an international reputation for creating intricate, quasi-architectural constructions, built out of salvaged materials which are then completely transformed via an almost alchemical process.

Patrizia Biondi will showcase a series of works for Sydney Contemporary which hover somewhere between traditional understandings of painting and sculpture. With these new works, we see Patrizia Biondi once again transmuting discarded cardboard into artworks that are now offset by the introduction of highly polished and elaborately detailed wooden frames.

These seemingly abstract works are underpinned by an avid interest in contemporary socio-political issues, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the rapidly changing nature of society and the establishment of global finance as culture. Patrizia Biondi’s works are seductively bright and tactile, drawing you in and prompting you to lust over works of art made from the detritus of our overly materialistic society.

Elwira Skowronska is a Polish-born, Sydney based artist known for creating intricate and heavily detailed paintings and prints, which reimagine the invisible minutiae of our world. She is interested in transforming previously unseen matter into evocative and ethereal abstract works which beautiful though they may seem, are nonetheless grounded in science and digital technologies.

For Sydney Contemporary, Elwira Skowronska will present a series of her distinctive pointillist style paintings and mesmerising digital video works. The series will romantically re-imagine the micro-cellular world of the sinister COVID-19 virus to embrace a new manner of sublime that is at once terrifying, yet undoubtedly mysteriously alluring. Seen through the lens of a microscope, the series will visualise the beauty and terror that underlies the replication of infectious viruses inside the living cells of organisms.

The following links provide short video excerpts from Elwira Skowronska’s three video works: Deep Eclipse_Starburst, Deep Eclipse_Gravity, Deep Eclipse_Void.