Standout Solo Presentations Coming to Melbourne Art Fair in 2025

The 18th edition of Melbourne Art Fair returns in the Victorian summer, 20 – 23 February 2025, to present new and iconic artists. With a focus on solo shows and works of scale and significance, the Fair supports the exhibition of thoughtfully curated presentations that offer an in-depth exploration of artistic practice from Australasia’s leading galleries and Indigenous art centres. 

Ahead of the 2025 edition, discover a selection of upcoming solo shows coming to the Fair next year.

Michael Cook
Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane)

Past, present and future collide in Michael Cook’s works, home to both vast chasms of disparity and intense points of connection. Cook’s photographic works critically examine the historic and present-day treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. He employs the camera as the supreme intermediary device – the ‘third eye’ which can bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photograph is, for Cook, that imaginary place of possibility where we can be invited to experience the other side of the coin, roles in reversal, worlds inverted, histories re-written. The images promise imaginative pathways through minefields of associations, as we sense potential unravellings of historical consequence. 

Cook has exhibited extensively, nationally and internationally. His artworks are held in all major Australian collections, and in significant international collections, including the British Museum, London; The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA. 

Michael Cook, Welcome Sign, archival pigment print on 310 gsm paper, various sizes. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.

Kenny Pittock
MARS Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne)

Pittock’s playful practice draws on the iconography and nostalgia of quotidian Australia. Hand-crafting the everyday ephemera and experiences of collective memory, Pittock’s works are humorous microcosms of the greater anxieties that face our world today. By creating tangible representations of transient objects and encounters, his visual language reminds the viewer to locate a constant in the fleeting, melding the timeless with the timely. 

At the Fair in 2025, MARS Gallery will present Your Lunch Is In The Fridge, showcasing a new series of Pittock’s unique ceramic shopping lists.  Inspired by the real text on one anonymous, discarded  shopping list recovered by Pittock, Your Lunch Is In the Fridge, reminds us of the universality of the mundane. 

Pittock has held solo exhibitions in Italy, Singapore and Aotearoa / New Zealand, as well as in many public institutions throughout Australia. His work has been a finalist in many prizes including the 2024 Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize at Geelong Gallery, and his artworks are included in many collections including Artbank, Bendigo Art Gallery, the University of Queensland and the National Gallery of Victoria. 

Kenny Pittock, Burger Bread Rye, 2024, Acrylic on ceramic, 21cm x 7.5cm. Courtesy the artist and MARS.

Reko Rennie & Harriette Bryant
Ames Yavuz (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore)

Next year, Ames Yavuz will present two dynamic solo exhibitions featuring newly created works by esteemed artists Harriette Bryant and Reko Rennie. Both artists bring powerful narratives and visually compelling styles that examine and challenge perceptions of Aboriginal identity, power structures, and cultural history within an Australian and global context. The presentations aim to highlight the strength and significance of their individual practices while drawing meaningful connections between their approaches to storytelling and artmaking. 

Rennie will present a series of vibrant new paintings and intricately crafted stone sculptures. The new body of work continues to explore and assert Aboriginal identity within a contemporary setting, pushing the boundaries of visual language. Through his signature blend of street art aesthetics, bold use of colour, and symbolic iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage, Rennie’s paintings carry a narrative of cultural pride, resilience, and the assertion of Indigenous presence. 

Reko Rennie, RR-RS, 2024, acrylic and pigment on linen, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz.

Emerging artist Harriette Bryant from Mimili Maku Arts in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands will showcase a series of wall–bound assemblages of vintage serving plates to create a profound recount of the Aṉangu experience of atomic testing, and the devastating effects of nuclear weapons testing by the British at Maralinga. Bryant’s autobiographical practice pieces together different storylines related to her extended family, often working with found materials and content, creating equally sinister and humorous retellings of Australian history. 

Installation view of works by Harriette Bryant, 2024. Courtesy the artist, Mimili Maku Arts and Ames Yavuz. Photography by Jessica Maurer.

Drew Connor Holland
Nasha Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney)

Returning to Melbourne Art Fair next year after a standout solo exhibition of works by Mark Maurangi Carrol, Nasha Gallery will present three drafts of the same poem by Drew Connor Holland – a continuation of the exhibition of the same name presented by the gallery in December 2023. Of the exhibition Holland writes “When I was asked to describe these works I saw them as a Reformation of heartbreak— symbols of an alchemic spiritual repentance eroded with the passage of time. The Lutherian sensibility reframes things. How might one heartbreak look after a thousand years of merciful transformation? How would an archaeologist understand the notes app? How would my search history make someone feel in the deep future?” 

Holland’s work is about how we catalogue memories: in digital archives, in junk drawers, in our heads. He sees his work as contemporary archaeologies, collating our experiences of love and anxiety through the transformation of hoarded data. Every piece is rendered as fragile; each differing surface absorbs or rejects elements of the image depending on their material qualities. Instead of slick and new their finish is battered and old — like a crumbling fresco or tapestry. In this state they force a gentle hand and ask for care. 

Drew Connor Holland, angels keep empty spaces where something can be left, 2023, synthetic polymer, marble dust, damar, watercolour, ink on birch panel, 14 x 14 cm, 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Nasha Gallery.

Hannah Gartside
Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne)

Tolarno Galleries will premiere 40+ new small sculptures from Hannah Gartside, made from worn antique and vintage women’s leather gloves. These new sculptures of anthropomorphised rabbits form part of Gartside’s ongoing series, Bunnies in love, lust and longing, which began in 2016. Gartside expands on the series, “The gloves have been manipulated to depict bunnies cuddling, hanging out, pleasuring themselves and each other. After years of functioning as protection against impropriety and cold weather, these gloves now bring to life little experiences and relationships. Bunnies… use the intrinsic human practice of interpreting hand-gestures and body language to convey secret feelings and hopes, desires, and elicit empathy and recognition in the viewer.” 

Hannah Gartside works across kinetic sculpture, installation and quilt-making. Characteristically sensual and poetic, her works transform and, in some cases, animate, found fabrics, clothing and ephemera to articulate experiences and sensations of longing, tenderness, care, desire and fury. 

Recently, Gartside won the 2024 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and was announced as a recipient of the prestigious Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship for 2025. Recent commissions include Forest Summons (for Lilith) at the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now, 2023, and Loie, Lilith, Sarah, Pixie and Artemisia for Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Hannah Gartside, from the series: Bunnies in love, lust and longing, 2024, found leather gloves, wire, cotton and wool fabric, weighted curtain cord, thread, 13cm L x 9cm W x 7cm H. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries.

Chunxiao Qu
FUTURES (Naarm/Melbourne)

Chunxiao Qu is an artist and published poet whose work folds pointed humour into conceptual making with irreverence and serious intent. Her wide-ranging practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, neon, print-making, poetry and fashion. Both her poetry and art embrace play in language, provoking her audience and testing truisms regarding art and life. Her ‘tributes’ to conceptual artists copy and adapt key works in art history while shifting meaning beyond satire. Humour’s tricks of contrast and surprise are employed, yet irony lives side-by-side with sincerity, as bedfellows in disguise. 

Select solo exhibitions include Art is a washing machine that is washing itself, FUTURES, 2023; An artist doesn’t need a label, Curated by Amelia Wallin, LRI Biannual Façade public Art Commission, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo (2022-2023); COPY, Curated by Chelsea Hopper, 99% Gallery, Melbourne(2022); Chunxiao Qu, Lon Gallery, Melbourne (2021); The title is no longer relevant, curated by Chelsea Hopper, Trocadero ArtSpace, Melbourne (2021). Select group exhibitions include Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Curated by Chelsea Hopper, BLINDSIDE, Melbourne (2022); White Night Bendigo, 2022, Bendigo (2022); Everything That Is Outside Of Us, Curated by A Constructed World, Palazzo Vai, Prato, Italy (2017). She has published two poetry collections: This poetry book is too good to have a name & Logic Poetry (Discipline, 2022) and Popcorn, Porn of Poetry (no more poetry, 2021). She is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary. 

Chunxiao Qu, Wig shoes, 2017, shoes, synthetic wig, 45 x 15 x 32 cm, unique. Courtesy the artist and FUTURES.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February 2025, taking place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets, on sale now.