One of the most beloved names in our Newport Gallery stable, Emily Gordon will present her first solo presentation at Michael Reid Sydney in December. This special release of five new paintings arrives after a succession of sell–out shows and also follows the artist’s shortlisting in this year’s Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize.
Celebrating the titular neighbourhood’s densely layered streetscapes, The Paddington Project sees Gordon’s sweeping and delightfully detailed vistas expressed on her largest surfaces to date.
“I wanted to delve into a more intimate understanding of the distinctively local” says the artist, who beautifully captures the eclectic jumble of Victorian rooftops and gelato-toned terraces that spill over hilly topography. In this this quintessentially Sydney suburb of Paddington, Gordon has found the perfect subject to take her practice to a newly immersive scope.
Works of art in this exhibition are currently available to preview by appointment. Our exhibition will open to the public on Thursday November 28. To discuss an acquisition or to arrange a viewing appointment ahead of the exhibition opening, please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au
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For our final major exhibition of 2024, Michael Reid Sydney will present the first solo exhibition from Dyarubbin/Hawksbury–based contemporary painter Julz Beresford since she was inducted into the gallery’s stable of artists. A Journey To The Heart will form a fabulous and fitting capstone to Michael Reid Sydney’s 2024 exhibition program, which commenced in January with Beresford’s widely celebrated show, Breathe Deeply.
Reflecting on her lifelong affinity for the Hawksbury region of New South Wales, the moody, atmospheric and monumental landscapes of Breathe Deeply were an immediate sell-out success, establishing Beresford as a rising art star whose work is closely watched and coveted in Australia and abroad.
In her newest exhibition, Julz Beresford explores changing light over the Hawksbury River, treating audiences to her exquisite renderings of dusk and dawn. Beresford’s paintings are awash with Romantic sensibilities, sending the viewer on a journey through glassy, rippling waterways that snake through tangles of bush and tumbling sandstone.
Motivated collectors were quick to acquire artworks from this exhibition at Sydney Contemporary 2024, most while still drying in the artist’s studio. Those seeking to acquire Beresford’s work are encouraged to contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au now, for access to and information about the artists first Regional Gallery exhibition taking place at The Basil Sellers Art Centre in March 2025.
Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is delighted to present Snakes and mirrors – a spectacular new body of work from one of Australia’s most acclaimed and influential contemporary artists, Petrina Hicks.
After a wonderfully received preview of select works from the series – which featured as part of Hicks’s recent survey show in Perth – Snakes and mirrors has now debuted with an expansive solo presentation at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne, curated by MAPh director Anouska Phizacklea.
Hicks’s large-scale photographs draw from mythology, fables and art history to re-frame contemporary female experience. Permeated with a sense of magical realism, animals and females often appear together to represent aspects of the psyche and allude to the complexities of female identity.
Central are the porous boundaries between human and animal states and the affinities between females and animals. In Snakes and mirrors, Hicks contemplates the self-awareness of animals and our desire to understand the phenomenology of animal life from a human perspective. Underpinning this series is an exploration of animal consciousness: how do animals experience the universe?
Hicks was moved by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy, which portrays the mystical relationship between humans and animals and contemplates how they experience time and phenomena differently. For Rilke, humans perceive time as a linear continuum of past, present and future, while animals exist in a unified, harmonious totality different to our worldview.
Within Snakes and mirrors, Hicks challenges the traditional human-centred vision of the world to emphasise the interconnectedness of humans and animals – serpents, birds, monkeys and humans bind together, blurring the boundaries between the two in intimate vignettes that propose time in stasis.
Hicks’s MAPh exhibition marks the capstone to a remarkable year for the internationally celebrated artist. It arrives after the record-breaking secondary sale of her 2005 work Shenae and Jade, followed by another landmark auction result for her 2013 work Venus.
Snakes and mirrors is Hicks’s first institutional showing on this scale since her celebrated retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Bleached Gothic. “In Hicks’s work, we are drawn to the tiniest gesture or detail amplified beyond mundane reality into a zone of the imaginary,” writes curator Isobel Crombie in the lavishly illustrated monograph published alongside the 2019 exhibition.
All works from Snakes and mirrors can be explored and acquired below. For more, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is delighted to present a collection of extraordinary new works by a dynamic assembly of ten leading Australian contemporary artists – showing throughout November at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
Working across sculpture, painting and photography, this creative cohort includes many of the most acclaimed and influential voices in Australian art today – now joining forces for a special Michael Reid Beyond presentation conceived alongside the National Emerging Art Prize Winners’ Exhibitions.
From a rhythmic, colour-soaked painting by internationally celebrated Ngan’gikurrungurr painter and master weaver Regina Pilawuk Wilson and the fecund floral dreamscapes of award-winning photographic fabulist Tamara Dean to a coterie of Troy Emery’s magnificent fringed sculptures, which slink, sashay and strike languorous poses on plinths and podiums throughout The Garden Gallery, this vibrant and diverse display celebrates the expansive possibilities sparked by a meeting of technical mastery and imaginative daring.
This alchemy is echoed throughout the solo exhibitions of the two major prizewinners from last year’s National Emerging Art Prize, painter Joe Whyte and ceramicist Annarie Hildebrand. We are pleased to complement their new bodies of work, Roma and Transience Cubed, with a buoyant group survey – a pairing that brings together two rising talents alongside some of the country’s most established names.
Reflecting the ambitions of our offsite projects platform to take contemporary art into spaces beyond Michael Reid’s five brick-and-mortar galleries, our installation at The Garden Gallery features spectacular, newly available work by Narelle Autio, Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, Gerwyn Davies, Tamara Dean, Troy Emery, Michelle Gearin, Dr Christian Thompson AO, Lucy Vader, Regina Pilawuk Wilson and Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa.
The Garden Gallery is open daily from 10am to 4pm. Entry via Mrs Macquaries Road, opposite the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
For more, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
