Ones to watch: emerging Australian artists to support and collect
These eight young guns of the art world are challenging convention and making names for themselves.
From big-ticket exhibitions at major institutions to cult gallery shows, Australia is a humming with artistic activity. Much of that energy is being driven by a cohort of emerging artists, whose progressive take on contemporary issues, unconventional approach to medium and raw talent are attracting critical and popular attention.
Whether you’re a serious collector or gallery groupie, as we emerge into the new year, there are no shortage of early-career artists to keep an eye on. Here, we introduce you to eight particularly bright young names to follow, support and perhaps even collect in 2023.
Nadia Hernández
From toucans to sweet peppers and a ‘suspicious koala’, it’s impossible not to gravitate towards the colourful motifs that leap from Nadia Hernández’s multidisciplinary body of work. In the last two years, the Venezuelan-born, Sydney-based artist has held solo exhibitions at Melbourne’s contemporary Australian gallery Station, exhibited as part of Sydney Contemporary 2022’s cutting-edge installation program, Amplify, and been a finalist of the esteemed 2021 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize.
Her work has also been seen at Mecca Beauty after she was selected as its ‘holiday artist’ at the end of last year. The work she created wasn’t just splashed across Mecca’s limited-edition Christmas packaging, it was also acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.
Beneath her colourful tapestries, paper constructions and prints is a narrative that intertwines the personal and political, informed by her experience as a Venezuelan woman living in Australia. Memory and family are recurring themes. ‘In the water where the beans soak (+++ La Visita), 2022’, the textile and neon light installation she exhibited as part of Sydney Contemporary, incorporated imagery of hands to tell the story of cooking as a way to connect with family and place.
While her large-scale works are awe-inspiring, the etch-like texture of Hernández’s oil compositions and the intricacy of her paper constructions are also thrilling — and slightly easier to hang in the home. Recognition for her work continuing to grow, both in Australia and further abroad.
Eliza Gosse
Gosse is known for her stylised vignettes of mid-century architecture and domestic dreamscapes, such as Iced Vovo's Where in The Little Red Tin, 2021 (above). However her portrait of her husband, the architect and designer Benjamin Jay Shand, made the 2022 Archibald Prize selection, which contained a greater diversity of early-career artists than ever before. Titled ‘Somewhere near home’, 2022, it more than held its own in a room of heavy-hitters.
Demand for Gosse’s work continues to soar; a solo show at Brisbane’s Edwina Corlette gallery is slated for April, while fashion and interior designers are knocking down her door to collaborate.
Shaun Daniel Allen (Shal)
He only recently took up painting, but the Yugambeh/Bundjalung artist known as Shal is a born creative — chances are, you’ve come across his tattoo artistry on Instagram, or perhaps you’ve even caught him playing in a hardcore punk band Nerve Damage. But since putting ochre to canvas in 2020, his enigmatic compositions have been moving audiences all over the nation and attracting the attention of our most prestigious cultural institutions. Full of life and movement, Shal’s paintings become portals through which he searches for, and connects to, Country.
With live duration artworks hosted at the Powerhouse Museum, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in conjunction with Dan Boyd’s major solo exhibition, Treasure Island, last year, it will be fascinating to see what 2023 brings for Shal.
Mia Boe
For Brisbane-raised Badtjala artist Mia Boe, painting is a both a means to record and recover historical trauma and violence, and a way of connecting with her Burmese and Indigenous Australian ancestry.
Her work is characterised by vivid colour and hauntingly beautiful silhouettes with long, spindly fingers that make her work instantly recognisable, the young artist is notching up solo shows all over the nation and being selected for Australia‘s most in-demand residencies: currently she is the studio artist at Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary, a sojourn that ends in 2024. Stay tuned.
Orson Heidrich
Embossed with intricate topographies and inked with distorted photographs, Orson Heidrich’s metal sculptures edge the line between fine art and industrial design. For the emerging Sydney-based artist, the industrial link is both aesthetic and thematic — through his expansive practise, he explores the relationship between artisans and industry, and his enigmatic works are often made in partnership with traditional fabricators, welders and casters.
His pieces have a magnetic presence. At Heidrich’s solo show, ‘Mechanical Advantage’, which opened at Sydney’s Station gallery in late 2022, his aluminium work was a hit with the critics. Whatever he does next will be big.
Nabilah Nordin
For Singaporean/Australian sculptor Nabilah Nordin, a sense of playfulness and state of conscious naïveté are imperative in creating her charismatic constructions, which border on the surreal. She has exhibited at the Singapore Biennale, staged a solo show at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne and in November, she became the first Australian artist to feature in ‘New Positions’, as part of the curated section of Art Cologne, the longest-running art fair in the world.
With an “ever-expanding sculptural vocabulary [that] strives for the slimy, slopping, seeping, slippery seduction of sensuous surfaces,” Nordin is challenging the art world’s reputation for seriousness — and the art world can’t get enough.
Ellen Virgona
Australian photographer Ellen Virgona not only to captures the ephemerality of small interactions —whether it be a whisper between friends or the expression of a loved one processing grief — but renders them in such a way that the viewer feels as if they were present, witnessing the split-second in real time. It comes down to intuition, and Virgona’s is remarkably good, which is why fashion brands from Gucci to Romance Was Born have tapped the young talent to collaborate. Shot predominantly on film, her black and white prints are destined for gallery walls, publications and billboards all over the world.
In the meantime, she is exhibiting at China Heights gallery alongside emerging artists Lucy O‘Doherty and Henrietta Harris at Sydney’s China Heights gallery this February.
Angus Gardner
Whether he’s painting, sculpting or drawing, the level of energy and curiosity Angus Gardner brings to his work is infectious, which is why his gallery shows are such delightful events to attend. In 2021, he was chosen to participate in ‘Clay Dynasty,’ a major exhibition of studio ceramics in Australia at The Powerhouse Museum. He’s also represented in the institution’s permanent collection.
Twisted into zany shapes and layered with lashings of metallic paint, Gardner’s sculptures are the manifestation of an imagination unencumbered by limitations. Watch as his presence within the local art market continues to grow.