Chelsea Gustafsson (Berlin)
Chelsea Gustafsson has presented six solo exhibitions across the Michael Reid gallery network, including four at Michael Reid Murrurundi and one, Onlookers (2025), at Michael Reid Berlin. Based in Barwon Heads in coastal Victoria, the artist has developed a distinctive painting practice in which found and familiar objects are cast as the protagonists of intricate pictorial stage plays. Working with extraordinary precision on intimately scaled, thick timber boards, Gustafsson recasts the still-life genre as a portal into cinematic worlds in miniature, drawing the viewer in and offering a kaleidoscope of stories within each artfully constructed tableau.
Delighting in the alchemy of objects staged in dynamic sculptural arrangements, Gustafsson’s compositions toy with framing, scale, depth of field and trompe l’oeil effects, often nesting pictures within pictures and allowing motifs to recur from one body of work to the next. Across recent years, her paintings have become increasingly layered and referential, balancing realist exactitude with a playful, often enigmatic sensibility. Salvaged chairs, discarded packaging, postcards, kitschy porcelain ornaments and fragmented imagery appear layered within the painted space. The result is a series of illusory, joyfully enigmatic micro-worlds: dynamic and dense with meaning, yet intimate in scale. Painted on thick timber boards, each composition is spliced together with a precision that belies its proportions, producing scenes rich with narrative depth and optical intrigue.
“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 the artist. “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.”
Chairs first emerged as a motif in Gustafsson’s work as symbols of “our lazy comforts; our busy, sedentary lives,” she says, referencing our throwaway culture while finding unexpected beauty in what was once cast aside. With her ultra-precise hand and instinct for atmosphere, Gustafsson conjures an evocative mood through the placement of these and other props, as well as the interplay of light and shadow that brings them to life as they appear wrapped, veiled or dramatically obscured at the centre of each still-life scene.
As her work has evolved – becoming more playfully dioramic, pictorially layered, and referentially complex – these salvaged elements have come to represent the creative potential of reinvention: an act of looking at our material world anew. By peppering her pictures with personal nods to popcorn movies and other pop- or sub-cultural talismans, Gustafsson reveals how the past lives of objects can become entangled with our own private lexicons of references, memories and associations — constructing new stories from the remnants of the old.
“If someone told me that Chelsea Gustafsson painted with a single horsehair brush – and some artists have – I would not have been surprised at all,” writes our Chairman and Director, Michael Reid OAM. “These jewel-like oil paintings are utterly beguiling in their skill. Yet beneath their striking command of technique lies a composition that can often be read as contemporary still life or vanitas painting, depicting familiar furniture and other household objects in arrangements that are unusual and, in some cases, jarring – often giving the impression of an aftermath, or of objects abandoned by their owners. With enormous ability, Chelsea takes the structure of an old way of doing art and reconfigures it all into the world of now.”
Most recently selected for the 2026 Salon des Refusés at Sydney’s S. H. Ervin Gallery, Gustafsson has also been recognised as a finalist in the Lester Prize (2025), Omnia Art Prize (2025), Basil Sellers Art Prize (2024), Kennedy Art Prize (2021, 2023) and Lethbridge 20,000 (2023). In 2024, her work entered the City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection.
For enquiries, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
