Sydney Contemporary’s tenth edition filled Carriageworks from 3 to 6 September 2026. Among more than 100 exhibitors and over 500 artists, certain paintings invited a slower encounter.

Mitch Cairns’s Lifelike (Elizabeth’s on Oxford) and Coloured Glass (for Oscar), both from 2026, arrange familiar forms into unexpected planes of colour and light. Presented by The Commercial, they carry the intimacy of an artist’s daily world.

The Coloured Glass series began in 2022, its apparent abstraction carrying personal and narrative references. Lifelike grew from those explorations into still lifes shaped by lamplight, books and domestic interiors.

Books, lamplight and coloured glass become something less familiar on canvas. The paintings keep that uncertainty alive.

Catherine O’Donnell’s Neighbours and The Quiet Hours, both painted in 2026, find their subjects in the details of suburban architecture. Fibro walls, window frames and an awning become arrangements of light and colour. Nothing moves, yet the houses feel occupied by lives just beyond view.

O’Donnell’s practice has long returned to the idea of home. Her drawings and paintings attend to buildings that can become so familiar they almost disappear from notice. Here, a pale green façade and a blue wall carry that intimacy into oil on canvas, presented by Dominik Mersch Gallery.

The attraction is immediate, but it deepens with time: the shadow beneath a window, the warmth of a blind, the quiet distinction between one home and its neighbour. These are ordinary details given room to hold our attention.

Sid Pattni’s Shallow Violence (Part IV) and Shallow Violence (Part II), both from 2026, meet the viewer with a different intensity. Ceremonial dress and elaborate borders surround faces interrupted by black. The eyes remain visible, holding their place within the image.

Presented by Michael Reid, the works belong to a practice shaped by questions of identity, belonging and the legacies of colonial representation. Pattni draws on Mughal miniatures, Company painting and European portraiture, bringing those traditions into an uneasy proximity.

In Part IV, hand-beaded appliqué extends the painting into texture. Its richness invites a closer look at a portrait that also withholds. Across both works, ornament and interruption remain in tension.

A bowl, a bottle, fruit and a cloth: the gathering in Annette Blair and Kirstie Rea’s To gather – fallen has the ease of something set down at home. Its material changes the encounter. The composition is made in glass.

Shown by Sabbia Gallery within their collaborative presentation The Poetry of Things, the work brings the artists’ attention to everyday objects into a shared still life. Familiar forms retain their softness and apparent lightness, even as glass gives them a lasting presence.

The modest shelf stayed in mind long after the first encounter: an everyday gathering, made enduring in glass.

A fair gathers a city’s art life into a few days. Its conversations continue in studios, exhibitions and galleries, with more time to return to a work and follow an artist’s practice.

The first encounter may be instinctive. A work that stays in mind—a colour, a material, a familiar place seen afresh—offers a reason to return.

Sydney Contemporary 2026 took place at Carriageworks from 3 to 6 September.