Sarah Contos

Sarah Contos (b. Perth/Boorloo, l. Sydney/Bidjigal Country) completed a Bachelor of Design for Performance at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2004 and a Master of Art (Fine Art) at UNSW Art & Design in 2010.

She has collaborated on performance, costume, and stage design projects since 2002 and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2009. Contos has undertaken residencies at Artspace, Sydney; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Beijing; and DESA, Ubud, Indonesia. Contos was awarded Creative Australia’s Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales Cité International des Arts Studio, Paris, and the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia. She has undertaken commissions for the ‘Balnaves Intervention Series’ at the National Gallery of Australia and ‘The Great Strike 1917’ at Carriageworks and has works in private and public collections throughout Australia, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Sarah Contos is represented by STATION, Sydney and Melbourne.

Gravity Above 2024
Screenprint on canvas

Gravity Below 2024
Screenprint on canvas

Universes Build and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist Yet to be Born (Telekinesis) 2024
Screenprint on canvas

Universes Built and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist Yet to be Born 2024
Screenprint on various fabrics

Courtesy of the artist and STATION, Naarm / Melbourne and Gadigal / Sydney.

Developed for the exhibition 'Sarah Contos: Eye Lash Horizon' at UNSW Galleries, assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, and the UNSW Galleries New Contemporaries Fund.

The UNSW Galleries New Contemporaries Fund supported the development and production of screen-printed fabrics for the exhibition ‘Sarah Contos: Eye Lash Horizon’.

Contos draws on personal markers and references from literature, cinema, design, and music, incorporating them into video animations, printed collages, repurposed furniture, textiles, and hand-forged sculptures. Generative AI models also produce unique photorealistic images from textual prompts, where the computer’s hallucinatory responses are encouraged. The screenprints serve as a scrapbook of influences, including Hannah Höch’s pioneering photomontages, which often depict subconscious drives, and the swirling, psychedelic production design in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 1971 and Eyes Wide Shut, 1999. Contos’s limb-like forms reference earlier works such as Carpet Burn, 2017, while the anthropomorphic cane assemblages connect to her ongoing fascination with garden furniture at actor Bela Lugosi’s North Hollywood home, which informed works in the 2019 exhibition 'The Bite Mark of the Butterfly'.