Each year, Melbourne Art Fair brings together exciting artists from across Australasia, both established and emerging – and the 2025 edition is no different.

This time around, there’s the chance to buy contemporary pieces from more than 100 artists (presented by 70 galleries and arts centres), plus large-scale installations, video art, activations, artist talks and more from February 20 to 23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Ahead of the event’s return, we spoke to two exhibiting artists to find out about their careers, what got them interested in art, where they find inspiration and what to expect from their Melbourne Art Fair exhibitions.

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Reko Rennie

Reko Rennie may have his own exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia – Rekospective: The Art of Reko Rennie, until January 27 – and a slate of international shows scheduled for 2025, but it’s a homecoming of sorts to be among other Australian artists at the Melbourne Art Fair. Born and raised in Footscray, the Kamilaroi artist got his start in the streets and is now changing global perceptions of Indigenous Australian art.

How do you describe your style?
That’s always a tricky question. It’s just my version of making work in a particular format, blending iconography, imagery and using different mediums to make a statement or talk about history and politics in this country.

Do you have a favourite medium?
I always loved to do painting and sculpture, and public art because it’s been an extension of where I’ve come from, making graffiti. Having that ability to be seen and heard in a public environment is always really strong and it’s free from institutional bias and wealth and power – anyone can have access to it.

Do you have different approaches when you use different mediums?
Certain mediums will dictate the type of work. For instance, the work I did around the referendum – the title of that was YESMOTHERFUCKERSYES – reused the old “yes” text that was featured in the 1967 Referendum for the right to vote.

A half century later, just about, people were being asked in a referendum if Aboriginal people could be included in the constitution or be acknowledged, but we saw how that was such a contentious issue. So that painting was a symbolic gesture to go, “look, it’s so ludicrous that people have been asked to vote on something so powerless and so silly [because it should have been a given, not a voting issue]”. Narratives that I want to have maximum impact or make a statement about will dictate the type of medium that I use.

At what point did you decide to pursue a career in art?
I never went and studied art, I actually went to university as a mature age student and I studied journalism. I was at the Age in Melbourne and I just found that what I wanted to do as a journalist I wasn’t able to do, and that was to raise more awareness of Aboriginal affairs.

At the same time I was painting and doing shows and I had this opportunity to do a residency in Paris at the Cité [Internationale des Arts]. A lot of other prestigious Australian artists and well-known artists had done that and I made a call to just stop full-time work and take a chance and be an artist full time. That was early 2009 and I never looked back.

When you exhibit overseas, do the viewers there understand the context of your work?
In many other countries there’s been a lot of other communities where colonisation, dispossession of land, culture and identity has unfortunately been a very common issue. When it’s broken down in that context, then it’s not so foreign. I’m just using contemporary formats and contemporary colours. I’ve never wanted to be confined by this romanticised notion or stereotype of authentic Aboriginality that gets traded upon from a tourist point of view: the person in the desert hunting kangaroos or playing a didgeridoo and painting dots. Unfortunately we all get lumped into this monoculture and it’s just a mistake. The fact is that the majority of Aboriginal people who identify as being Aboriginal live in urban environments.
[My art is] one representation of this diverse culture of Aboriginal identity.

What can we expect from you at the Melbourne Art Fair?
I’m doing some new works, some smaller works, and then there’ll be a couple of sculptures – and neon work as well.

It’s great for people to come along to see a really diverse selection of art and galleries and Australian contemporary art within one house, and a great opportunity for artists to be showcased.

Drew Connor Holland

Drew Connor Holland’s aunt was an artist who taught him everything from painting to monotype printing and etching, but it wasn’t until he started winning awards for his Warhammer pieces that he seriously thought about studying art. Now, in his Melbourne Art Fair debut, he’s bringing a human touch to AI versions of the world.

When did you decide to pursue an art career?
Growing up in Newcastle, art is never really the most realistic option so I thought I’d do Warhammer [miniatures]. I would go to the Games Workshop kind of stores as something to do. I started to get more into the painting side of them, and I was winning Golden Demons, which is a prize for Warhammer painting.

The people at the store were like, “You can paint Warhammer figures, but you can’t draw anything”, so then I decided to compulsively draw Space Marines to prove them wrong. Then [choosing university degrees] it was between Bachelor of Comms and Fine Arts. I did fine arts in Newcastle for a year but I felt like I wasn’t really being pushed enough, so then I went to NAS [National Art School] and the rest is history.

Sometimes, honestly, I’m really excited to do less art so I can do Warhammer again. I started doing it again during lockdown. But realistically, there’s Warhammer references in every single one of my shows.

Now I understand your Poems series a bit better.
Those are actually the RTB01 sprue [plastic mould from which you pop out figurine parts], the very first Space Marine sprue that was made in the ’80s. I bought those from a guy in London; he bought them when they first came out. They were remnants of his childhood toys. They then got cast in my grandfather’s silver and turned into art.

How would you describe your style?
The last show is where I started to figure out what I was getting into, which is speculative archaeologies. And honestly, I hate the term “speculative” in art – I feel like anything over three syllables needs to be put in a bin – but the whole focus is about manufacturing a relationship with an audience or manufacturing a sentiment or feeling. I try to be conscious of some kind of interaction.

[The works in Poems] are literally the original kind of artefact I’m on about. It very much draws a direct reference point for me with Warhammer, but also it’s about that, “I remember on my 14th birthday I got my first Warhammer set and I was almost afraid to clip it out because it was so precious”. How do you materialise that feeling? So those works feel like they could be some kind of relic from a thousand years ago that you found beneath some fields, or it also could be some strange brooch that you found in your grandmother’s attic.

What are you working on for Melbourne Art Fair?
I’m doing more metal works. I’ve been doing these works recently that are AI-generated forgeries, little 10-by-10-centimetre works. They go through a very long Mr-Bean-movie-esque painting process to degrade and make it look like forgery, which is a really beautiful process. I often find painting quite a narcissistic thing and having this non-human starting point and adding some sense of humanity to it is the most objectively thoughtful painting that I can consider myself doing – but I can’t enter them into anything because a whole bunch of prizes are now like “no AI can be used in generating the work”.

Especially for an art fair, you have to really hone things down to a razor’s edge. I love the challenge of capturing an audience. The job of an artist is to share the abstract of an idea. And the beautiful thing about being an artist is that you don’t have to communicate with words or with a clear kind of solidity, you can create a sense of communication through something as abstract as a childhood memory.

If people come to an art fair, they need to realise that it’s many small invitations for conversation and they can access them however they want. I’m just keen for that.

Melbourne Art Fair runs from February 20 to 23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Use the code BROADSHEET20 to receive 20 per cent off tickets, Friday to Sunday. Get your tickets now.

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