Artists

Shaun Daniel Allen (Shal), a Yugambeh-born Bundjalung artist, has quickly risen to prominence with his bold, lyrical paintings that bridge cultural worlds. His debut solo show, Balun (2021), introduced his distinctive visual language and connection to Yugambeh Country, earning institutional recognition including commissions for the Art Gallery of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art. Shal’s exhibitions, Nyanyahlila (2022), Distant Familiarity (2024), and a Louis Vuitton collaboration showcase his ever evolving practice. Global brand partnerships with Apple Music, Chopard, and Hermes further highlight his versatility. Rooted in punk, tattooing, and surfing, Shal’s unconventional path informs his art. His works blend Bundjalung ochre, foraged dyes, and topographical motifs to explore Country, identity, and personal history. The emotional depth of his paintings resonates widely, marking him as a vital voice in contemporary art.

Max Berry’s work is comprised of semi-fictional paintings, bucolic scenes, vignettes and simple observation. Particular attention to line, colour, and the play between light and shadow reveals a single-minded attempt to slow time down. The paintings work in concert: dreamlike images of memory, levitation, water, and clouds condense to produce a companionable silence - an open invitation to the viewer to examine for themselves what they see. International residencies and regional trips within Australia have equipped Berry with a pool of reference material: sketches, notes and photographs from these journeys crowding his studio. A slow, intuitive editing process has allowed specific details, memorable locations and persistent motifs to resurface for closer examination, before being committed to paint. In this way, disparate places and subjects are brought together without their relationships being overly determined or dictated. Berry manages to conjure a place of solitude and reflection, taking the viewer somewhere between the actual and the sensate. A single glimpse, a curious excursion that considers the relationship between world and self. How are we to inhabit the poetic space separating places, words and things? Berry proposes a kind of magical presence in a world that is not quite our own but is, nonetheless, most welcoming. Max Berry (b.1987) Since completing A Bachelor of Design at the UNSW Art and Design, Max has received the Australian Council for the Arts ‘Artstart Grant’ and awarded the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award. Berry has been selected as a finalist in numerous art prizes including The Art Gallery of New South Wales Wynne Prize, The S H Ervin Gallery Salon De Refuse and the William Fletcher Travelling Art Scholarship. Consecutive solo exhibitions interstate and overseas since have led to acknowledgment in publications such Artist Profile and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has been selected for an artist residency programs at Bundanon Trust, Cill Rialaig Arts Center, Ireland and Nelimarkka Museo, Finland. 'It’s time for the heart and the body, to have their say. The more the days wore away, the more I gathered a sense of the greatness of the world, the immensity of time – and the littleness of myself and my concerns in the face of that great multiple panorama of History. I was no longer important, even to myself; and that realisation was like a liberation of the soul.'

Kitty Callaghan is a Sydney-based photographer and mixed-media artist exploring femininity through surreal collage and photography. Working primarily with her own original images including deconstructed self-portrait. She blends analog and digital techniques to create dreamlike compositions that challenge perceptions of the female form. Her work has been exhibited at notable institutions and galleries globally and featured in publications bridging art, fashion, and feminist narratives. As a Contributing Editor at RUSSH magazine, Kitty merges her artistic vision with editorial storytelling. Her practice oscillates between meticulous hand-cut collage and experimental photography, crafting a visual language that is both intimate and disorienting. Through fragmentation and reconstruction, she invites viewers to reconsider themes of identity, memory, and the female gaze. With a growing presence in contemporary art, Kitty continues to push boundaries with her distinctive, layered approach.

Mark Drew is a Tokyo-based artist whose work explores the intersection of nostalgia, music culture, and visual storytelling. Best known for his mash-ups of early ‘90s hip-hop lyrics with panels from vintage Peanuts comic strips, Drew’s work draws a direct line between the techniques of visual art and the sonic language of hip-hop. Much like the producers who shaped iconic tracks by layering borrowed beats, loops, and vocal snippets into entirely new compositions, Drew “samples” visual culture. By recontextualizing familiar imagery and text, he creates original works that carry echoes of a collective memory. His approach pays homage to the creativity inherent in remix culture, where the act of combining and reframing can be just as expressive as an invention from scratch. Originally from Sydney, Australia, Drew co-founded China Heights Gallery in 2004 before relocating to Tokyo, where he continues to build a body of work that fuses music, comics, and design. His compositions are clean and deliberate, resembling newspaper comic panels and album covers that invite viewers to both read and listen with their eyes. Drew’s work resonates because it feels both deeply personal and universally familiar. The comic frames he uses are unaltered, but when paired with lyrics from artists like Nas or Wu-Tang Clan, they take on new meaning. Each piece becomes a layered remix of cultural moments, filtered through the artist’s perspective and arranged with the same rhythm and cadence that drives the beats behind the bars. Through this process, Drew extends the lineage of sampling into the visual realm, reinforcing how art, like music, is often born from what came before. His exhibitions feel like mixtapes you can walk through, where every pairing tells a story and every lyric lands like a line of dialogue.

Antwan Horfee (b. 1983, Paris, FR) pays reference to B-Movies, underground comics and science fiction films. Toying with perception, he creates multiple focal points where wild rollercoaster rides lead through different layers of lines and forms. Sometimes, in the background, is a blurry landscape or a portrait of one of his heroes. The hyper-realistic work shows an enhanced visualization of color and shape, which is as beautiful as it is distortive. Horfee’s inspirations span over a vast expanse: from traditional Japanese woodblock printing, such as the landscape perspectives found in ‘ukyio-e’ (translating as ‘pictures of a floating world’), through to technical processes involved in rendering images used to create virtual reality and render three-dimensional worlds in video-games. The surreal characters or objects found in his works, often dominated by abstract gestures, are signs of an age of diversity, noise, abundance, and uncertainty. His intense dynamics and palettes are symptomatic of a time when the flow of digital images is extensive and fast. This artist is continuously experimenting – combining both coincidence and sophisticated drawing techniques – his masterful and individual, nuanced and contemporary visual language have become a trademark of his time and generation. Antwan Horfee lives and works in Paris, where he graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Horfee has participated in numerous shows, including exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (2024, 2019), in the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2019), and the Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles (2021).

Kyle Montgomery is best known for his dazzling “Crystal Mary” sculptures which he constructs using crystal and antique religious figurines depicting Mary, mother of Jesus. His ethereal works combine Catholic iconography and new-age spirituality, and address notions of reincarnation, protection, rebirth, and the afterlife. At first glance, Montgomery’s sculptures look like typical “Virgin Mary” statuettes, with the figure in different positions of prayer or with her arms outstretched. Up close, however, a mass of crystals pours out from inside of her robe in place of Mary’s face and torso. Montgomery continues to receive recognition for his sculptures and has exhibited his works at galleries in Philadelphia, New York, LA, Montreal, Paris and London