Sullivan+Strumpf is thrilled to present Support structures, a dynamic new solo exhibition from acclaimed artist Sanné Mestrom, featuring powerful new paintings, works on paper, terrazzo concrete and bronze sculptures, alongside key pieces from her recent installation for the National Gallery of Australia, The whole is greater than the sum of her parts (31 May – 21 Sep 2025): a dedicated interactive space created in response to the landmark exhibition “Cézanne to Giacometti: Masterpieces from Museum Berggruen”.

Support structures invites audiences to immerse themselves in the geometry of Mestrom’s works and engage with recurring themes of her practice, which re-examine female representation and the maternal experience.

The exhibition opens at Sullivan+Strumpf’s Gadigal/ Sydney gallery Thursday 26 February until Saturday 22 March 2026. Please join for the opening event, Saturday 28 February, 3 – 5pm.

Sanné Mestrom’s practice draws on 20th century iconic modernist works to explore the psychological, emotional and cultural significance of art historical legacies. She explores how value is accorded to objects, their visual vernaculars and how they may become substitutes for values or beliefs. Through replication, appropriation and disruption, her work filters historical mythologies, questioning notions of lineage, originality and influence, further altered through her experience of ‘making’.

In Mestrom’s work, minimal and abstracted forms are the building blocks of dynamic relationships of figure (body) and space (landscape). She engages a wide range of disciplines and endeavours including public art and play, architecture and the natural phenomena governing our daily lives. While her works are highly compelling visually, with their curvilinear language, they are completed by their communication with surrounding architecture and landscape, creating conversations of monumentality, permanence and precision. They engage the day- to-day lived experience and presence of the viewer, communicating with body, perception, touch, assumption and meaning.

Mestrom is also driven by an understanding of art’s role as a conduit for embodiment and a locator of place, of how art can bridge the built and natural environments. For the artist, sculptural surfaces provide places of refuge, rest and potential for movement and action to be fully embraced by both artist and audience alike. Her works are always expressive of the body: from the span of her limbs, and their range of movements, to her expressive preparatory drawings.

Sanné Mestrom has achieved numerous accolades, as both artist and academic. Her work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Shepparton Art Museum, and in private collections nationally and internationally.

Mestrom’s interdisciplinary research and creative project Art, Play, Risk, is supported by an Australia Research Council grant, and is focused on providing new creative and scholarly research into public art’s role in the design and planning of intergenerational future cities. She is senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and a member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Artist’s Advisory Panel.

Her major commissions include, The whole is greater than the sum of her parts, 2023, Commissioned for Beyond, Melbourne Art Fair 2024; The playful exchange, 2024, Preston Train Station; Lady of the lake (2023) Lake Macquarie City Council; The secret, 2023, Drysdale Public Library, Victoria; Sphinx in repose (Sitting), 2017, Commissioned for Sydney Contemporary and Weeping women, Ian Potter Public Sculpture Commission, Monash University Museum of Art (2014).