Sales at the latest edition of Sydney Contemporary, Australia's largest contemporary art fair, are down for the fourth year in a row.
Sydney Contemporary 2025, held from 11 to 14 September, turned over A$16m (around US$10.5m) in art sales across its four days, according to its event organisers, despite being the largest-ever edition, with 116 exhibitors and almost 500 artists from Australia and around the world.
By comparison, last year’s fair brought in A$17.5m in sales. In 2023 this figure was A$21m and in 2022 it was A$23m. The fair was forced to migrate online in 2021 and 2020 because of Covid. In 2019 it achieved sales of A$18m.
Despite the adverse figures, Sydney Contemporary top brass appear steadfast and confident. Founder Tim Etchells tells The Art Newspaper he remains “absolutely” committed to Sydney Contemporary which will return to its home of Sydney’s Carriageworks for its tenth edition next year.
Etchells is keen to emphasise that this year’s fair achieved record visitor numbers of 26,440. “The market everywhere is changing,” Etchells says. For example, he said many sales were tending to be clinched in the couple of weeks after an art fair has closed up and gone home, and these sales are not included in the totals. Case in point: the biggest price tag at the fair was A$1.5m, for a painting by Emily Kam Kngwarray, which hung in the booth of the gallery Utopia Art Sydney. Utopia director Christopher Hodges tells The Art Newspaper that the Kngwarray is "currently at a collector's home under consideration".
While many galleries at the fair reported a packed and vibrant event, Etchells says the slower sales were due to the greater “cautiousness” being witnessed in the marketplace.
According to Etchells, younger generations of buyers have been attracted to the fair through the addition of a raft of galleries owned and run by new faces such as Sotiris Sotiriou of Coma gallery and Viktor Kravchenko and James Stevens of Nasha Gallery. Both these galleries are in Sydney, but the fair also featured new-generation galleries from Melbourne.
Long-established gallery director Michael Reid, who has galleries in Sydney and Berlin, tells The Art Newspaper his booth turned over A$1.2m in sales at Sydney Contemporary this year.
Audiences had packed into the cavernous old rolling stock factory every day of the fair, if not to buy then at least to listen to curated talks and watch art performances. “They [the organisers] got that right,” Reid said.
Reid adds that slower demand for decorative art, which reached a peak in Covid but has now fallen away, has created a “two-speed art market” in Australia that favours galleries with a more sophisticated offering.
This year’s fair introduced a special section called Photo Sydney, dedicated to contemporary photography. While most of the photographers were Australian, the display included international works by photographic artists including Roger Ballen. The director of Photo Sydney, Sandy Edwards, says the initiative had achieved the important aim of bringing photography “inside the room” as a prestige art form like any other.
“My wish was that there was more space [for Photo Sydney],” Edwards says. “We had double the number of applications than we had booths.” Photo Sydney will return next year, Edwards confirms. As for Etchells, he is planning more features for next year’s tenth edition of the event.
