Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery opens two new exhibitions on Friday 23 October, presenting fresh work by two long-represented artists side by side. Tom Polo shows a group of new paintings titled 'and afterwards, a garden', while Linda Marrinon presents new sculptures and paintings in a show called 'Yellow is for Candour'. An opening reception for both exhibitions runs from 5 to 7pm, and the shows remain on view until 21 November 2026.

Polo, who has worked with the gallery since 2019, uses painting and painted environments to examine how talk, uncertainty and gesture can function as portraiture. His pictures frequently combine written words with figures, drawing on close observation, odd encounters, personal memory and invented characters. A thread running through his practice is the emotional and theatrical quality of relationships between people, whether in social settings, staged spaces or interior psychological states.

Marrinon, represented by the gallery since 1983, brings a practice shaped by feminism, art history and a sharp sense of humour. She first came to attention in the 1980s with witty, satirical paintings that mixed text, cartoon imagery and references to both popular culture and fine art. Since 2006 she has concentrated mainly on sculpture, making large numbers of small-scale figures and busts in tinted and painted plaster, using methods associated with nineteenth-century figurative work. Like her paintings, these objects combine high and low culture and have been described as deliberately anti-heroic and anti-monumental.

The pairing gives visitors two distinct approaches to figuration in a single visit: Polo's large, text-laden canvases, including a work measuring 213 by 198 centimetres, alongside Marrinon's modest plaster figures. Catalogues for both exhibitions are available from the gallery on request.