By Morgan Reinwald in Sydney

Australia’s largest art fair has returned, and it’s showing that an age-old medium is dominating the contemporary art scene.

In a historic railway workshop in Sydney’s inner city suburb of Eveleigh, more than 100 galleries from across the world will showcase 500 artists from 33 countries from Thursday.

Sydney Contemporary has recorded more than $154 million in art sales since it began a decade ago, and prices at this year’s fair range from less than $50 to more than $1 million.

Many of the contemporary pieces on display discuss frustrations with the digital era, such as a mosaic titled Soft Drive from Sydney-based artist Kitty Callaghan.

She takes aim at how AI is affecting artists’ ownership in her work that features 1700 YouTube screen grabs.

The stills are from videos made in the 1990s and 2000s by artists such as Kylie Minogue and INXS.

“The whole piece is really a commentary on copyright,” her representative from the China Heights art gallery, Nina Treffkorn, told AAP.

“Copyright used to be so important for the artist in the digital realm, whereas now with the likes of AI scraping, it almost has become redundant.”

However, a program curator at Sydney Contemporary suggested AI won’t destroy art.

The fair helps shape what the next decade of contemporary art will look like, event organiser Jay Mitchell said on the eve of the fair’s opening.

Dominating the modern art world is painting.

“If you walk around the fair I think one of the the things that’s immediately apparent is just how much painting there is,” he said.

“Painting feels really alive and incredibly contemporary… at a time when so much of our visual culture is digital and instantaneous, painting by contrast offers this compelling physicality.”

Its renaissance will be explored in one of the program’s panel discussions.

Other discussions will include collecting art when you live in a small space or have a constrained budget and how antiques are making a comeback.

Sydney Contemporary will run at the Carriageworks centre until Sunday.

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.