Louise Frith – New Works

In November, Michael Reid Sydney will welcome a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Eora/Sydney-based artist Louise Frith, who debuts in our upstairs exhibition space after a stellar run of solo exhibitions at our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands galleries.

Building on the creative breakthrough of her widely celebrated Murrurundi shows Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries – as well as her recent collaboration with fashion brand Nancybird, which saw her elegant flannel flowers and other painted botanicals transposed onto textiles – Frith’s forthcoming project will take us deeper into the thickets of the bushland covering Sydney’s North Head.

Moving with painterly gusto between areas of intricate, tightly controlled detail and an overall mood of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and tangle right to the edge of each canvas.

Sketching out in the field before returning to her painting studio, Frith observes and translates North Head’s dense floral interplay, seasonal shifts, and the filtered patterns of light and shade cast across the forest floor.

The resulting paintings often read less as conventional landscapes than as exuberant, impressionistic fields of pattern-like flora that envelop and transport the viewer. Each work is at once precisely rendered, yet verging on abstraction, with overlapping forms and immersive, optically charged, tapestry-like effects.

To discuss works by Louise Frith, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au