From 20 to 23 February 2025, Melbourne Art Fair, celebrates its eighteenth edition and marks the first iteration since its transition to an annual model – drawing together over 100 artists at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre; this is the first fair under the direction of Melissa Loughnan. This year’s program is entirely female-led, and places First Peoples and traditionally overlooked artists at the forefront, inviting visitors into an unprecedented celebration of boundary-pushing contemporary art.
Seventy of the region’s top galleries and Indigenous art centres will be showcased in a mix of bold solo, dual artist and curated presentations. Among the highlights is Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf’s solo presentation of new works by First Nations artist Tony Albert, who continues his visual dialogue with the work of Australian artist Margaret Preston. This dialogue interrogates the problematic use of First Nations iconography in domestic design, exploring the boundary between ownership and appropriation.
Championing the work of First Nations artists is a major focus of the fair, with over forty participating. Melbourne-based Alcaston Gallery is one of many participants who represent a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, some of whom will be showing their works in the gallery’s curated presentation of paintings and sculptures: Aileen Napaljarri Long, Ada Pula Beasley, Shirley Macnamara, Louise Robertson and Rhonda Sharpe. This year’s fair also welcomes the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair (VFPADF) Showcase Exhibition, with the stories and creative expressions of thirty-seven Victorian First Peoples artists and designers serving as a preview of the forthcoming fair – whose inauguration will be co-timed with Melbourne Art Fair 2027. Includes daily tours, artist talks, weaving workshops and panel discussions.
Creating a platform that supports the next generation of artistic practice, the fair also welcomes nineteen “young galleries” – established in or after 2017. One of these is Sydney-based Nasha, with works by Sydney-based emerging artist Drew Connor Holland. Interested in how we catalogue memories – in digital archives, in junk drawers, in our heads – Holland sees his work as “contemporary archaeologies,” collating our experiences of love and anxiety through the transformation of hoarded data.
Yona Lee, Clock in Practice, 2023, clock, stainless steel, 40 × 68 × 23cm. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney
Under the Melbourne Art Foundation 2025 Commission, multi-disciplinary Singaporean artist Dawn Ng and South Korean, Auckland-based Yona Lee will present two ambitious new works. Ng – represented by Sullivan+Strumpf and presented in partnership with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art – will exhibit a new moving-image work exploring the tenor and trajectory of time via a hypnotic cascade of falling colour. While Lee – represented by Fine Arts, Sydney and in partnership with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre – will develop a work that unfolds as sculptural gesture; what it means to make sculpture comprised of found objects in the networked digital age will be called into question through Lee’s large-scale installation.
Four distinct platforms in Melbourne Art Fair’s broader artistic program include: BEYOND, three large-scale installations, with works by Paul Yore (Melbourne and Sydney’s STATION and Adelaide’s Hugo Michell Gallery), Jahnne Pasco-White (STATION) and Kim Ah Sam (Melbourne’s Vivien Anderson Gallery); CONVERSATIONS, a series of talks and panels; PROJECT ROOMS, a non-commercial platform for experimentation, presenting multi-disciplinary artists; and VIDEO, moving-image art from new and iconic contemporary artists working at the fore of digital works.
