“A cloying cocktail, a Coolangatta motor inn, the sweetest mangoes, syncopated steel drums piped out across a pool deck,” says Eora/Sydney-based contemporary artist Gerwyn Davies, setting a languorous scene as he lists the namesakes of his upcoming series, Calypso, which arrives at Michael Reid Sydney in May and can now be previewed by request. “The term is used to name a variety of things, each summoning the swelter and sweat of Summer.”

Fashioning wild costumes with found objects and fabulously gaudy materials, Davies works at the nexus of performance, photo media and soft sculptural assemblage to construct personae poised between real and ersatz. These adventures in magnificent excess upend our expectations of a photo portrait – that it must reveal some essential truth about its subject. Instead, the self is slippery and unstable: a conga line of pop-cultural archetypes, visual puns, queer iconography and contorted, abstracted figures set against uncanny, sun-kissed spaces brought to life with hyperbolic, cinematic style.

In Calypso, these elements conjure a world of Australian tropical kitsch – one not too far removed from the parochial torpor of Porpoise Spit, albeit queered and reimagined with warm nostalgia and knowing camp.

For previews and first access to works from Calypso by Gerwyn Davies, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

New York based painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders will return to Michael Reid Sydney to present her third solo exhibition in 2025. Greenfield-Sanders’ photographically informed watercolour and oil paintings exemplify technical methods of astounding precision, represented by collections such as Solomon R. Guggenheim collection, The Brooklyn Museum collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

To register for pre-exhibition information please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

To celebrate the expansive survey show Yolŋu Power at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – featuring many of the most formidable talents working today at the Yirrkala Community in East Arnhem Land – Michael Reid Sydney will present its own exhibition highlighting the storytelling, ecology and materiality that threads through contemporary Yolŋu art practice.

This will be a chance for collectors to discover a sublime new series of intricately detailed etched-metal artworks by Gaypalani Wanambi, the pre-eminent female voice within the ascendant Found Movement and the winner of the 2024 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize.

To receive a preview and priority access to this June presentation, please email tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au