Among Friends

Michael Reid Berlin is delighted to present the latest solo exhibition by Victorian artist Chelsea Gustafsson and her first in-gallery presentation since the announcement of her representation. Aptly titled Among Friends, this dazzling new body of work finds Gustafsson revisiting familiar motifs with renewed gusto while instilling a playful sense of personality into each of the starring subjects – collected curios and anthropomorphised detritus – at the centre of her small yet highly cinematic vignettes.

Based in the Victorian coastal town of Barwon Heads, Gustafsson has honed a remarkably original painterly style that melds extraordinary technical skill with lashings of wit, pictorial panache and a sense of narrative intrigue. Working with an ultra-precise hand on thick, intimately scaled timber boards, the artist recasts the still-life genre as a portal into cinematic worlds in miniature, with found and familiar objects acting as protagonists within intricate pictorial plays.

Delighting in the alchemy of objects staged in dynamic sculptural arrangements, Gustafsson’s compositions toy with framing, scale, depth of field and trompe l’œil effects, often nesting pictures within pictures and allowing motifs to recur from one body of work to the next. Salvaged chairs and disco balls, discarded packaging and postcards, kitschy porcelain ornaments and fragmented pictures appear layered within the painted space. The resulting works pull the viewer into enigmatic micro-worlds – scenes spliced together with a precision and optical charge that belies their bijou proportions.

“Painting for me is a contemplative response to the news and events going on in the world, the books I’m reading, and podcasts and music I’m listening to,” says Gustafsson, a finalist in numerous prizes, including the Lester Art Prize (2025), Omnia Art Prize (2025), Basil Sellers Art Prize (2024) and Kennedy Art Prize (2021, 2023). “Often I find myself drawn to an object or image and it’s only through the repetition of portraying it that I begin to understand its presence in my work.”

In Among Friends, the artist spins sanguine characters, filmic atmospheres and art-historical allusions from unexpected sources. A mirror ball and flickering votive effect a kind of discofied memento mori, while objects gleaned from her studio play peek-a-boo through rumpled paper.

For enquiries, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au