Rex Dupain: Reimagining the Australian Beach Through Memory, Material and Imagination

The Sand Series 

Curatorial statement

For more than three decades, Rex Dupain has explored the Australian beach as a place of memory, identity and cultural imagination. Yet in his newest body of work, The Sand Series, the artist moves beyond traditional photographic observation to create something entirely constructed: miniature landscapes where fragments of the past are transformed into new worlds.

Presented by Litsa Veldekis Gallery at Photo Sydney, The Sand Series marks a significant evolution in Dupain’s photographic practice. Rather than capturing moments as they occur, Dupain builds them, carefully assembling images, materials and natural elements into photographs that sit between photography, collage and installation.

Initially trained as a painter at the National Art School, before completing postgraduate study at the University of New South Wales, Dupain’s artistic foundation has always extended beyond the boundaries of the photographic image. After returning to photography in the 1990s, he developed a distinctive visual language shaped by experimentation, material process and an ongoing fascination with the human relationship to place.

The beach has remained a central subject throughout his career. From Australia to Europe, Mexico and the United States, Dupain has documented the beach as a shared cultural landscape, a place of leisure, ritual, connection and personal memory. In The Sand Series, however, the beach is no longer simply observed. It is reconstructed.

Working from an extensive archive of beach photographs collected over many years, Dupain carefully cuts and isolates figures from their original contexts. These fragments, once documentary records of real moments, are transformed into components of imagined environments. Arranged within shallow sand formations, they become actors within a newly created landscape.

“At first glance the process feels like collage using scissors, blades, and fragments of past pictures,” Dupain explains. “However, the work changes once it leaves the studio. The figures are transported outside and pegged into a trough of sand where they can transform into a new environment. What begins as fragments from pictures becomes a micro world waiting to be photographed.”

The resulting images reveal Dupain’s fascination with the tension between control and chance. The painstaking construction of each scene contrasts with the unpredictability of the natural world. Light, shadow, wind and cloud formations become active collaborators, determining the final image and introducing an element of impermanence.

This interplay between the handmade and the ephemeral is central to the power of the series. Dupain creates environments with extraordinary precision, yet ultimately surrenders the final outcome to the conditions of the moment. Photography becomes not simply a record of reality, but a conversation between intention and accident.

The figures within The Sand Series appear familiar yet strangely removed from time. Detached from their original photographs, they become universal symbols, beachgoers, swimmers, wanderers and observers suspended within landscapes that feel both remembered and imagined.

For collectors, the series represents an important development in Dupain’s ongoing investigation of Australian culture. While his earlier photographic work engaged directly with the lived experience of the beach, The Sand Series moves inward, exploring how places are stored, reconstructed and reinvented through memory.

The result is a body of work that challenges the traditional boundaries of photography. These images are not simply photographs of constructed scenes; they are carefully crafted handmade photographic worlds, part archive, part sculpture, part landscape, and entirely unique to Dupain’s artistic vision.

• Litsa Veldekis

Rex Dupain – The Sand Series
Presented by Litsa Veldekis Gallery
Featured at Photo Sydney, SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2026

Image credit: courtesy of the artist and Litsa Veldekis

Available editions

80 x 120cm, edition of 3 + 2APS 

100 x 150cm, edition of 2 +1AP 

SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY, BOOTH PS15, 3-6 September 2026

for available works email: art@litsaveldekis.com

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