Sarah Contos

Hello friends 🙋🏻‍♀️ Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting each of the bodies of work from my exhibition, EYE LASH HORIZON. The show is too dense to fit in one post! ✨ As each of the four gallery spaces loosely represents a body part: Brain, Womb, Belly and Soul, today we enter the first gallery space: BRAIN (part 1) Universes Built and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist yet to be Born, 2024 260 x 720 x 400cm In this space- it’s filled to the brim with feelings, thoughts and memories. What makes the fingers flick and the heart tick. Hand cast aluminium, paper mache, wigs, screen-printed fabrics, repurposed leather jackets, electroplated objects, Australian wool and a set of World Book encyclopaedias are just a wee tiny slice of materials used. The gallery space was the exact proportions of my studio and as each sculpture was forming, its own mise en scène was evolving around it. Little universes. The colour palette was inspired by my outfit to my first Blue Light Disco. I think I wore my first bra there too. Curator Karen Hall writes:   “American fashion designer Rick Owens, renowned for his distinctive use of contrasting textures and cultural references, once described his work as ‘Frankenstein and [Greta] Garbo, falling in love in a leather bar’. Owen’s vision is a portmanteau of glamour and grunge—or ‘glunge’—epitomised in a darkly romantic, deconstructed approach to luxury garments. (2) This fusing of disparate sensibilities and materials with an array of visual cues is an act of ‘falling in love’ that underscores Contos’s practice.   ‘Brain’ opens with the installation Universes Built and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist Yet to be Born 2024, in which Contos fashions a poetic dissonance involving a striptease dance sequence from the film Flashdance 1983, the Maschinenmensch robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis 1927, and the pseudoscience of spirit channelling.” This space is a deconstructed quilt of quiet desires and a thumping introspective self. A drop of blood on a needle, a rip of tulle, a hurricane, a love letter to a pre teen self 💖🖤 EYE LASH HORIZON @unswgalleries 📸 @jacquie.manning @stationgalleryaustralia

BOOK LAUNCH FRI 5.30-7PM @unswgalleries 💖

Nice to be a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize 🙏💕 @artgalleryofnsw Midnight is a study of time played out through a composition of flowers- captured in a transitional state of either decay or rising into bloom. Like the stroke of midnight, when one day passes into the next, so does the cycle of growth and deterioration that governs all living things. The work holds this threshold moment: neither fully one state nor the other, suspended between what has been and what is becoming. Oil on linen and canvas, screenprint on cotton, hessian, tulle, polyester fibre, stainless steel hardware 230 x 183.5 x 54 cm

NEWS | FINALIST STATION is pleased to announce that Sarah Contos has been announced as a finalist for the 2026 Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. "Midnight is a study of time played out through a composition of flowers, captured in a transitional state of either decay or rising into bloom. Like the stroke of midnight, when one day passes into the next, so does the cycle of growth and deterioration that governs all living things. The work holds this threshold moment: neither fully one state nor the other, suspended between what has been and what is becoming." - Sarah Contos, 2026 The Sulman Prize, established in 1936, is awarded for the best subject painting, genre painting, or mural by an Australian artist. Sulman Prize Art Gallery of New South Wales 9 May – 16 August 2026 To request a catalogue of available works by Sarah Contos, please email [email protected] (Images: (1) #SarahContos, portrait. (2) #SarahContos 'Midnight', oil on linen and canvas, screen print on cotton, hessian, tule, poly-fibre, stainless steel hardware, 240 x 183 x 70 cm, 2026. Photo: Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales) #STATIONaustralia @contosfox @artgalleryofnsw

Revisiting the leather works I made during the Cité residency back in 2019. The amount of leather jackets that were in the 1€ bin in the Paris vintage shops blew my mind. I ended up buying/saving as many as i could (not thinking of the enormous collective weight and the freight it would cost me shipping back to Syd!). The studio stunk of other peoples sweat and good times. I breathed it all in 🖤🖤🖤 @citedesartsparis . . . @stationgalleryaustralia

Just found a few more of these sweet prints from 2016! 💘 A2 size. Lovingly hand screen-printed by @aisle6ix $100 ea plus postage. DM me 💋

Yah! Finally i’m a mummy! We are overjoyed to welcome Lucy Diamonds to our little family! 💎🐾💕✨ Big thanks to RSPCA Sydney Adoption Centre- they are doing amazing and important things for our furry, feathered and scaley besties ❤️

So wonderful to see this work in ‘Living Thing’ a project by Tom Polo x Mobilia as part of Melbourne Art Fair! Seemingly floating alongside a blue beauty by @tomjoblake ✨ Check it out! ❤️ @mobilia_ @tompolo @melbourneartfair @stationgalleryaustralia 🔴 VERTICAL HOLD VII (The Shining) Hand tufted synthetic fibres (100%), stainless hardware, poly fibre, felt 220 x 155 x 40cm 🌹 Contact @stationgalleryaustralia for more info 💋

I love the smell of oil paint in the morning.

Art is a marathon…

Obsessed and haunted by this painting that occupies the wall in front of my bed. Still acting as my mirror- 20 years later.

In 2016 I made the best artwork ever! Now all I have is the corpse of the corpse of the corpse to lovingly behold 💔⌛️😇 c'est la vie!