Sarah Contos
Sarah Contos is an Australian artist who makes collages, sculptures and installations that blend textiles, screen printing, found objects and paint. Her work often looks at identity, femininity, eroticism, materiality, popular culture and history. She explains life in terms of contradictions, saying things like “I make quilts for art but never for warmth” and “I watch cooking shows but never cook.”
She studied art and design in Western Australia, earning a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1998 and a Bachelor of Design for Performance in 2004. She later completed a Masters of Art (Painting) at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. In 2009 she moved to Sydney to focus on her art career.
In 2015 Contos gained representation with Roslyn Oxley. She held a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2018 and created an installation for the Balnaves Contemporary Series at the National Gallery of Australia titled Nikola Tesla Sends Theda Bara to Mars. In 2019 she helped create site-specific installations for the Sofitel Darling Harbour as part of Sydney Contemporary.
Contos has been a finalist in several prizes and has received several awards. She won the Marten Bequest in 2011 and was a finalist for the John Fries Award in 2013. In 2013 she was one of the first recipients of the 4A Beijing Study Program. Her 2014 work, Personification of Past and Future Mythologies (Double-Headed Barry), was shown in the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize. In 2017 she won the Ramsay Art Prize, a $100,000 prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia, for her work Long Kiss Goodbye.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 04:14 (CET).