Sullivan+Strumpf is excited to present a major new exhibition from celebrated Sydney artist Michael Lindeman, opening at the Naarm/Melbourne gallery on Thursday 30 October 2025. Building on his long-running tongue-in-cheek exploration of the contemporary art world, Artists anonymous appears as both exhibition and group therapy: a multi-element installation that reimagines the gallery as a therapeutic space. Guided by Irvin D. Yalom’s theories of transformation and echoing Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational aesthetics, the artist employs finger painting on mirror, sculpture, and performance to construct a subversive world—self-reflective, absurd, and darkly funny.

In direct contrast to the romanticized notion of the artist as genius, Lindeman’s work embraces a kind of wilful idiocy, coupled with cerebral analysis—a bold combination that pushes the boundaries of form and discourse. His practice continually steps out on a limb to deliver sharp, unflinching innovation to the field.

For over twenty years, Michael Lindeman has unmasked the artist’s ambitions and anxieties, examining the forces of class, taste, and power that shape contemporary Australian culture. Employing humour as a disarming tool, his text-based paintings, drawings, and sculptures invert institutional structures, irreverently critiquing how financial and cultural value are assigned to creative practice.

With deadpan humour blurring fact and fiction, Artists anonymous draws audiences into an absurd yet critical dialogue. Conceived as a holding space for truth, contradiction, and the peculiar rituals of artists and the art world, Lindeman’s most ambitious exhibition to date offers hybrid therapy and quiet resistance, where humour and critique coexist.

On opening night, Thursday 30 October, Lindeman’s fictional writing leaps off the page and into the gallery with an uncanny performance. Three characters: a plumber employed by Duchamp Plumbing (Lindeman’s officially registered side hustle), a brandy-sipping Eastern European woman who sculpts with fruit and vegetables, and a disgruntled psychotherapist who paints between appointments, all drift through the space, engaging with the exhibition and audience; collapsing fiction into lived experience within the expansive Artists anonymous installation.

Inspired by recent meetings with Californian Conceptual artists and research at study centres and libraries in California, New York (MoMA, The Whitney, The Guggenheim), and Italy, Artists Anonymous is unapologetically open-ended: offering a witty take on the industry in which today’s contemporary artists operate.

Michael Lindeman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours, 1998), a Master of Fine Arts (2004), and is currently completing a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of Fine Arts.