Artist Talk: Mikala Dwyer

Faculty of Fine Arts invites: Public artist talk by acknowledged Australian contemporary artist Mikala Dwyer at 18.00 on June 4th in EKA, A-501

In works that explore how we relate to the object-world, Mikala Dwyer has pushed the limits of sculpture, painting and performance, establishing herself as one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists. She has been honoured with solo survey exhibitions at Sydney’s two major art museums, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Her many exhibitions internationally include The Recent, Talbot Rice gallery, Edinburgh, Ichiahara Art + Mix Triennale, Japan, Blessed Be, MOCA Tucson, USA (2018); The End of the 20th Century, The Best is Yet to Come—A Dialogue with the Marx Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2013); Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003); Verso Süd at Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome, curated by Franz West (2000); and shows at The Graz Museum, Austria; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK. Her work has been selected for the Lyon Biennale (2026) Istanbul Biennale (1995), the Biennale of Sydney (2010 and 2014) and the Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Australian Art (2010 and 2020)

Mikala Dwyer’s compounds invite open-ended interaction and take the viewer across boundaries of time, space and geography. While playful and exuberant on the surface, they almost always impel us to imagine something darker beneath—or above. Ordinary and familiar materials draw us in, transformed so as to bring attention to the unseen or occult or what society banishes from view. Emerging from a deep and disobedient engagement with modernist form and space, Dwyer’s works have an eye on the future and relationship at their heart—they have been described as ‘profoundly sociable’.

Dwyer’s work is always responsive to site and context, and her successful public art commissions include Monuments for Fishes, Barangaroo, Sydney 2026; Sydney Metro, 2024; Apparition, University square, Melbourne, 2020; In the Smoke of Ghosts, MUMA 2020; Egg Swing, 2012, Royal Women’s Hospital, Paddington, Sydney; Windwatcher, 2011, Central Park, Chippendale, Sydney; A Lamp for Mary, 2010, Mary Place, Surry Hills, Sydney; Swamp Sculpture, 2006, Omi Sculpture Park, New York, NY; and IOU, 2005, Docklands, Melbourne.

https://www.mikaladwyer.com/