Acclaimed West Australian painter Carly Le Cerf presents En Plein Air, a spectacular constellation of works on paper created at the coalface of the untamed landscapes that shape her practice.
Showing exclusively at Michael Reid Berlin, En Plein Air offers collectors a rare opportunity to experience and acquire original, accessible works by an artist firmly at the forefront of Australian landscape painting and one of the most sought-after names within our broader gallery network.
Bringing together a significant suite of gouache and watercolour sketches, drawings and annotated field studies, En Plein Air offers a direct and immediate connection between the landscapes in which Le Cerf immerses herself and the richly textured, large-scale encaustic paintings they ultimately give rise to. Together, her works on paper trace an evolving response to place across several immersive forays undertaken during a period of remarkable creative efflorescence and rising acclaim.
As her practice pushes towards ever more expansive and heroic terrain, Le Cerf’s work remains grounded in prolonged encounters with the land. “My creative process comes into being through immersing myself in the landscape and absorbing what the essence of that landscape is to me,” she says. This philosophy sees her walking, sketching and recording colours and sensations over long stretches before returning to the studio to translate those experiences into works of formidable emotional heft.
As writer Sarah Hetherington observes, Le Cerf’s paintings strive to express awe – “that universal human emotion… of reverence, admiration, even fear, in response to that which is grand, sublime and powerful.”
En Plein Air brings viewers closer to Le Cerf’s process, offering glimpses of the attentive looking, intuitive mark-making and physical presence underpinning her lauded practice.
For more information about the material on view and for acquisition enquiries, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au (Sydney) or colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au (Berlin).
In the lead-up to our first solo exhibition from Kristin Schnell, Of Cages and Feathers – and ahead of our opening celebration at the gallery on Saturday, 24 January, where the artist will be on hand to offer insight into her works – the Michael Reid team sat down with the German-born, Baltic Sea-based artist to discuss the ideas, inspirations, creative approach and environmental themes that inform her vibrant photographic practice.
“The exhibition brings together several bodies of work that revolve around the same central questions: freedom and constraint, care and control, and the complex emotional space between humans and animals,” says Schnell, who recently exhibited her work Son and Father in Sydney as a finalist in the prestigious Head On Photo Awards. “My bird models are originally from Australia. Colonial trade carried their ancestors to Europe, and generations have lived behind bars, far from their natural habitats,” she notes. “With the Head On Festival exhibition, they return home – at least visually – and that makes me very happy.”
Read our interview with Kristin Schnell below. Of Cages and Feathers is on view at Michael Reid Berlin until Saturday, 28 February, and all works can be explored and acquired online, at the gallery and by request.
For enquiries, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
How did your career begin, and what key moments or decisions shaped your path as an artist?
My artistic career began relatively late and very consciously. In 2020, I decided to focus seriously on photography as an artistic practice and joined a LensCulture Masterclass in Amsterdam. That experience was a turning point – it helped me understand photography not just as an image, but as a language for thinking and questioning the world.
A key decision was to work long-term on a single subject instead of moving quickly from project to project. My ongoing work with birds became a way to explore themes of freedom, control, vulnerability, and the complex relationship between humans and nature. Building my own visual world – rather than responding to trends or expectations – was essential.
Another important moment was realising that artistic development requires patience and investment. The first years were not financially easy, but exhibitions, publications, and the growing international dialogue around my work confirmed that this path was the right one.
Looking back, the most formative choices were committing fully to the work, allowing it to evolve slowly, and trusting that depth and consistency would eventually find their audience.
Can you describe your working process, from the initial idea to the final image?
My working process usually begins with an idea or a question rather than a fixed image. I’m interested in states of tension – between freedom and control, nature and construction, intimacy and distance. From there, I start building a visual situation rather than staging a narrative.
I work with carefully composed sets, colours, and geometric elements that create a kind of framework or stage. Within this constructed environment, chance plays an important role. The birds I photograph are never directed; their movements, pauses, and interactions introduce unpredictability and presence. I’m attentive to light, timing, and small shifts, allowing the image to emerge rather than forcing it.
The final image is the result of this balance between control and openness. I edit very carefully, choosing photographs that retain a sense of ambiguity – images that don’t explain themselves fully, but leave space for viewers to bring in their own emotions and interpretations.
What draws you to working with animals, particularly birds, as central subjects in your photographs?
I’m drawn to working with animals, and especially birds, because they exist at a powerful intersection of beauty, vulnerability, and symbolism. Birds are often associated with freedom, yet many live in conditions shaped or controlled by humans. That contradiction reflects broader questions about autonomy, care, and responsibility.
Working with birds allows me to speak about human conditions without directly depicting people. They become stand-ins through which themes of longing, confinement, tenderness, and projection can surface. At the same time, they remain fully themselves – unpredictable, present, and resistant to narrative.
Their presence introduces a form of truth into the image. No matter how carefully a scene is constructed, the animal cannot be fully controlled, and that tension is central to my work.
What have been some of your favourite career experiences?
Some of my favourite experiences have been moments when the work moved beyond the studio and entered a real dialogue with others. Seeing my photographs included in museum and institutional contexts was deeply affirming – not as validation, but as a sign that the work could hold meaning beyond my own intentions.
The publication of my first book, Of Cages and Feathers, was another important experience. Working closely with an editor and seeing the project take shape as a physical object clarified the long-term nature of my practice and how individual images relate to one another.
Equally meaningful have been conversations – with curators, editors, and viewers – where unexpected interpretations emerged. Those moments, when the work begins to live independently and provoke thought or emotion, are often more memorable to me than any single event.
What ideas and experiences have informed your more recent work?
My more recent work has been shaped by a growing awareness of responsibility – towards the animals I work with, toward the images I create, and toward the narratives they may generate. Over time, my focus has shifted from making single, resolved images to thinking more about relationships: between humans and animals, control and care, presence and absence.
Personal experiences have also deepened this shift. Living closely with animals has made me more attentive to subtle forms of communication, to trust, and to the ethics of proximity. I’m increasingly interested in moments that feel quiet or unresolved, where meaning emerges through restraint rather than spectacle.
At the same time, my work has become more open formally. I allow more space for chance, fragility, and imperfection – seeing these not as weaknesses, but as essential elements that mirror the complexity of the world we inhabit.
What questions are you most interested in exploring through your practice right now?
Right now, I’m most interested in questions around care, power, and responsibility – particularly in the relationships between humans and animals. I’m exploring how acts of protection can also become forms of control, and where the line lies between care and domination.
I’m also thinking a lot about projection: how humans assign meaning, emotion, and symbolism to animals, and what that reveals about ourselves. Working with birds allows me to approach these questions indirectly, through presence and gesture rather than narrative.
More broadly, I’m interested in how images can hold complexity without offering clear answers – how photography can create spaces for reflection rather than conclusion, and invite viewers into a more attentive way of looking
Can you tell us more about the works presented in this exhibition?
The works presented in this exhibition bring together several bodies of work that revolve around the same central questions: freedom and constraint, care and control, and the complex emotional space between humans and animals.
The photographs are carefully composed, often using strong colours and geometric elements to create a constructed environment. Within these settings, birds appear as living presences rather than symbols to be decoded. Their movements, stillness, and interactions introduce chance and vulnerability, subtly shifting the meaning of each image.
Some works feel more intimate and quiet, others more theatrical, but all share an interest in ambiguity. Rather than offering a single narrative, the exhibition invites viewers to move between images and form their own connections – allowing the works to resonate on both an emotional and reflective level.
Michael Reid Berlin ushers in the European spring with the first international solo exhibition from Naarm/Melbourne-based contemporary painter and celebrated stalwart of our Murrurundi gallery, Stacey McCall. The culmination of an extended artist residency in Paris, McCall’s series builds on the glittering success of her most recent Murrurundi show, Lucent, which similarly emerges from the sketchbooks she keeps during a sojourn in the City of Light.
Titled after the gorgeous, gauzy glow that washes through each picture and lights up her elegant, effortlessly arranged accoutrements and tableware, Lucent finds McCall honing her softly expressive painterly language rooted in tonal underpainting. Evoking the essence of her still-life objects with an economy of graceful gestures and pared-back textural markings that filter through clouds of earthy, peachy tones, McCall’s deceptively simple, deftly realised style feels perfectly attuned to the warm insouciance and easy eclecticism of a Parisian pied-à-terre.
With her distinctive and richly evocative approach to still life, McCall allows the cumulative impact of timeworn objects and artfully undone florals and fruit to conjure a familiar yet faraway mood.
For further information please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
Alongside Michael Reid Berlin’s career-spanning survey for Nasim Nasr – who will deliver an intimate talk and a personal tour of her exhibition on Saturday, 29 November – the gallery is pleased to present our recent conversation with the Tehran-born, Eora/Sydney-based artist, exploring the ideas, experiences and dualities that have propelled her multifaceted art practice for more than 15 years.
“The enduring thread is the dialogue between East and West – between my past in Iran and my present in Australia,” says Nasr of the connective themes that weave through the works now on view at Michael Reid Berlin. “Each project lives under this umbrella of seeking harmony between two cultural worlds. The narratives often begin with experiences from the East but are articulated and transformed through my life in the West. My work also speaks to the dualities we carry: black and white, pain and joy, the half-hidden and half-revealed. We live in constant tension between control and release, hope and hopelessness, usefulness and uselessness. These opposing forces shape us and form the visual and emotional language running through my practice.”
Now completing the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts studio residency in Paris, awarded by Creative Australia, Nasr is among the most original and essential voices in Australian contemporary art. Spanning photography, sculpture, performance and installation, her work has been exhibited across Australia and abroad – most recently at Photo London – and is held in major collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Powerhouse Museum, Artbank and the Parliament House Art Collection.
Read our interview with Nasim Nasr below. Works from her solo exhibition can be explored and acquired online HERE, as well as at the gallery and by request.
For all enquiries, or to RSVP to Saturday’s public event, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
What were some of your early creative influences?
My earliest influences included contemporary artists such as Vanessa Beecroft and Shirin Neshat, whose approaches to performance, the female body and cultural identity deeply shaped my thinking. I was also inspired by European masters like Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti, and by Persian poets including Forough Farrokhzad and Sadegh Hedayat. Their emotional depth, sense of vulnerability and explorations of identity have stayed with me throughout my practice.
These influences continue to appear in works such as Erasure (2010), where I reference Farrokhzad by writing and erasing her poetry Rebirth. In Restless (2015), a paragraph from Hedayat about masks and hidden identities is read in multiple languages. My performance Women in Shadow (2011, 2018) also reflects the visual and conceptual inspirations I draw from both Beecroft and Neshat. Across my practice, their impact can be seen in my ongoing focus on double identity, visibility, and the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed.
What ideas, experiences or themes do you return to in your work?
Across my practice, I return to themes shaped by my lived experience as an Iranian-born Australian woman – my first twenty years in Iran and the rest in Australia. Since moving here in 2009, photography and video have become central to my work, and the contrast between growing up under suppression in Iran and now creating freely in Australia continues to inform my narrative. I frequently explore double identity, displacement, cultural bipolarity, and the tension between relief and restriction.
The emotional and cultural contrasts between my life in Iran and my life in Australia remain fundamental. My work often seeks to build a bridge between East and West, between my past and my present. And yet the more I try to escape or erase my past, the more it reappears in my work.
What have been some of your favourite career experiences?
One of the most significant breakthroughs came shortly after I moved to Australia in 2009. In Iran, I had been a painter and drawer focusing on nude female bodies—work I was never allowed to exhibit. When I arrived in Australia, I was taken to Maslin Beach, a nude beach in South Australia, with the idea that I could finally draw freely. Instead, that moment became a turning point. After years of censorship, I suddenly found myself in a place where nudity was permitted, yet I instinctively felt the need to cover myself. This contradiction pushed me toward photography and video, exploring self-censorship and concealment in a free country.
The first photograph I ever took – Image of Liberation (2010) – emerged from this experience and remains my most published work. That moment of cultural shock was also a creative pivot that reshaped my entire practice. Another breakthrough came during COVID, when I began working with glass – a medium I’d never imagined using. I revisited the historical tradition of tear collectors used by women in 17th-century Persia and reimagined them through a contemporary lens. What began as an experiment became a meaningful extension of my practice, and the work was received extremely well. Glass tear collectors have since become an ongoing part of my artistic journey.
Could you tell us about Forty Pages?
Forty Pages began from a place of pain, frustration and exhaustion. Between 2009 and 2015, I was exhibiting internationally while still travelling on an Iranian passport. The process was extremely difficult: visas, interrogations, long airport stops and the constant anxiety of being treated with suspicion. Every journey felt heavy. I wasn’t yet an Australian citizen and became acutely aware of how a single document could control your movement, your freedom, and even your sense of self.
When I finally became an Australian citizen in 2015, I felt compelled to close that chapter by transforming it into art. I used my old Iranian passport and its forty pages filled with stamps, marks and traces of those years of struggle. In the series, the accumulation of stamps becomes a form of scar tissue as I build them onto my face, layer by layer, until I no longer recognise myself.
The iconic portrait where I cover my face shows only Australian entry stamps – symbolising a new identity and a new sense of belonging. Half revealed, half obscured, it reflects the complexity of migration and living between cultures.
Ten years later, I see Forty Pages as an emotional and political self-portrait. It still resonates, especially as global borders and migration debates remain fraught. It reminds me how fragile—and powerful—identity documents can be. Today, I travel freely with my Australian passport, and physical stamps barely exist. The fact that the work continues to speak to others shows that these struggles are not just personal, but global.
How does photography relate to your broader art practice?
Photography is deeply connected to all facets of my practice. The concept always comes first, and then the medium that feels most truthful brings it to life. Photography often becomes the primary form because it captures the immediacy of my emotional and lived experience, particularly through self-portraiture. Using myself as the subject allows me to express personal narratives in the most direct, honest way. But my ideas rarely feel complete in a single form. Video, performance and installation expand the narrative and add layers of meaning. Many works begin as photographs but find deeper resonance through movement, sound or the physical presence of the body.
Although self-portraiture is central, I also cast other models when needed. My very first subjects were my brother and sister, whose presence allowed me to explore identity and family history from different perspectives. In this way, photography becomes both foundation and connective tissue – an entry point that opens into performance, video and installation.
Could you tell us about your latest body of work, Unspoken Words?
Unspoken Words is a photography and video series developed over the past two years in response to witnessing global conflicts and the pressure around speaking – or staying silent. Today, no matter how you speak up, there are consequences; yet remaining silent creates an internal battle. This tension between expression and suppression became the emotional starting point for the work.
I began by reflecting on my own “unspoken words”, the things I carry but often cannot voice. From there, the work expanded into a broader meditation on collective silence, political pressure and the emotional weight of global crises. The melting blue ink in my hands and mouth – formed from an ice cube – became the central metaphor. Blue ink was the first ink I used as a child to learn to write, and it is also the ink used today to sign treaties and documents that govern nations. In the series, the ink represents the fragility of truth, the instability of speech, and the way words can be frozen, controlled or dissolved. Through this visual language, Unspoken Words explores the struggle between voice and silence, the personal and the political, and the weight of what we say and what we don’t.
How do you view the series as a continuation and a departure within your practice?
Most of my recent works – Measure of Love, 33 Beads, Forty Pages, and now Unspoken Words – are studio-based photographic series. In many ways, Unspoken Words continues this direction, but it also marks a shift through its use of blue and its focus on more internal, global conflicts. My process often begins with what I call a “mental pregnancy”– a period of pressure, reflection and emotional build-up. Once the idea is fully formed, I move into the studio and create the work in a single, focused moment. I frequently place myself in the image when the concept emerges from lived experience, because embodying it allows the emotion to transfer directly to the audience.
In 33 Beads, for example, I confronted the tension between holding on and letting go—of memories, objects, traditions. Placing myself physically within the work made the tension feel authentic. Across all these series, the first take is often the strongest – the moment where emotion and concept meet honestly. With Unspoken Words, I continued this approach while pushing into new themes such as silence, consequence and global conflict. The melting ink introduced a new metaphor and visual effect, marking a subtle evolution in my practice while remaining connected to the psychological intensity of my earlier work.
Looking across the works in your Michael Reid Berlin career survey, what themes or shifts define the last decade of your practice?
The enduring thread is the dialogue between East and West – between my past in Iran and my present in Australia. Each project lives under this umbrella of seeking harmony between two cultural worlds. The narratives often begin with experiences from the East but are articulated and transformed through my life in the West.
My work also speaks to the dualities we carry: black and white, pain and joy, the half-hidden and half-revealed. We live in constant tension between control and release, hope and hopelessness, usefulness and uselessness. These opposing forces shape us and form the visual and emotional language running through my practice. Over ten years, you can see the shift from performance and self-portraiture into more experimental works with objects, materials and metaphor. I leave it to the audience to decide whether these works contradict, complement or complete each other. My aim is to open space for viewers to reflect on the tensions and harmonies between these worlds – just as I do in my own life.
What projects are you looking forward to in the coming year?
I am currently working on a fifteen-year video screening survey at the Cité des Arts Auditorium in collaboration with a French pop composer who is creating sound compositions in response to my visuals. Together, we are presenting fifteen years of my video art, accompanied by her live performance – a dialogue between image and sound that highlights the connection between East and West. At the same time, I am developing a new photographic series titled Imprints during my residency. I am also researching a rare 7th-century Persian book, exploring hidden histories of slavery, lust and loneliness experienced by women. This research will inform a new body of work I hope to release next year, alongside potential exhibition opportunities.
Michael Reid Berlin’s 2026 program takes flight with the opening of Of Cages and Feathers – the gallery’s first solo exhibition from German-born, Baltic Sea–based contemporary photographer Kristin Schnell. Set to be toasted with opening drinks on Saturday, 24 January, Of Cages and Feathers presents a dazzling selection of poppy and playfully constructed bird portraits spanning several key series from across Schnell’s celebrated career.
Within the artist’s ebullient world, scenographic sets built from boldly interlocking geometries in brilliant, high-voltage hues deliver an optical charge befitting the outsized personalities of her feathered subjects. Quoting from the slick, pop-inflected lexicon of commercial photography – often stripped of natural context save for a shadowy suggestion of trees or sky – her vibrant images bring focus to the beauty, presence and quizzical interactions of Australian native birdlife, each affectionately lensed through the eye of a master colourist and singular visual stylist.
But beneath the surface dazzle of Schnell’s graphic compositions, the mix of exuberance and control that powers her practice also gestures to a quieter tension. “The exhibition brings together several bodies of work that revolve around the same central questions: freedom and constraint, care and control, and the complex emotional space between humans and animals,” she says, reflecting on the pertinent social and environmental themes that thread through Of Cages and Feathers and lend a compelling conceptual depth, urgency and a tinge of melancholy to her otherwise sunny scenes.
Sharing its title with the Schnell’s 2024 monograph, Of Cages and Feathers is the artist’s first presentation since her selection as a finalist in the 2025 edition of the prestigious Head On Photo Awards, which saw her shortlisted work Son and Father exhibited at Sydney’s Paddington Reservoir Gardens. “My bird models are originally from Australia. Colonial trade carried their ancestors to Europe, and generations have lived behind bars, far from their natural habitats,” says Schnell in an online Artist Profile published to coincide with the exhibition. “With the Head On exhibition, they return home – at least visually – and that makes me very happy.”
We look forward to welcoming visitors to the gallery over the coming month to experience Of Cages and Feathers by Kristin Schnell. For all enquiries – and to RSVP to our opening celebration and informal artist talk – please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
EXHIBITION OPENING
Saturday, 24 January, 2–4pm, Michael Reid Berlin
Ackerstraße 163, 10115 Berlin, Germany
The artist will be present.
To celebrate the announcement of Michael Reid Berlin’s representation of William Yang, we visited the Queensland-born photographer, performance artist and cultural trailblazer at his Eora/Sydney home, where he lives and works alongside his vast photographic archive spanning more than five decades.
Yang has been one of the most important and prolific chroniclers of Australian cultural life over the last 50 years, capturing the celebrated and the marginalised, the public and the radically personal with unwavering clarity, empathy and candour.
From his essential works of social documentary – lensed at the front lines of the parties, protests and performances through which LGBTQIA+ identity, autonomy and community came to be expressed and defined – to his intimate, diaristic portraits of family, friends and lovers, many of which were set against the ravages of the AIDS era, Yang has built an extraordinary body of work that today stands among the most significant social archives of the past half-century.
“William Yang is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most significant photographic storytellers, blending autobiography, social history and performance in a body of work that has helped redefine the nation’s visual narrative,” says Michael Reid OAM. “His work endures not only for its aesthetic and documentary power, but also for its gentle, unwavering commitment to truth-telling – across generations and cultures.”
Following the artist’s recent solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin, which brought together 14 key works from across his career, Yang’s permanent, ongoing representation in Europe offers further recognition of his work’s enduring resonance and global significance, while affirming our commitment to celebrating his practice on the international stage. Alongside this announcement, we are delighted to present a curated selection of iconic and indelible photographs once again drawn from across distinct stages of his career. Many are now in their final editions and are exclusively available to explore and acquire on the Michael Reid Berlin website or by request.
Propelled by his medium’s capacity for storytelling, Yang often inscribes and reanimates his photographs with handwritten recollections of encounters with his subjects, charting the ebb and flow of their relationships over time and offering intimate reflections on how each picture came to be. The sum of these stories is at once an urgent record of a vanishing queer and artistic underground and an ever-evolving statement of the artist’s subjectivity – expressed with an unvarnished immediacy that belies the quiet beauty and fleeting moments of grace in all the grit and glitter.
“A photograph captures a specific moment in time. You don’t have to do anything special to do this, it just happens, it’s part of the nature of photography,” Yang writes in the introduction to his 1997 book Friends of Dorothy. “Because it is the nature of the world to change and move onward, these moments can never be repeated. To take a photograph of an event as opposed to writing a document means that you have to be there.” Yang has always been there – bearing witness to the cultural, political and personal histories of the past half-century.
In recognition of his contribution to Australian visual culture and LGBTQIA+ visibility, Yang was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2021 – the same year that Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) staged his landmark retrospective Seeing and Being Seen, which traced his career from his exuberant early days documenting Sydney’s queer scene to his acclaimed bodies of work reflecting on cultural identity and family history.
“[My mother] thought being Chinese was a complete liability and wanted us to be more Australian than the Australians,” says Yang in an interview with QAGOMA. “So, the Chinese part of me was completely denied and unacknowledged until I was in my mid-30s and I became Taoist. It was through my engagement with Chinese philosophy that I embraced my Chinese heritage. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description, but now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression – I prefer to say I came out as a Chinese.”
“I would like my art to convey feelings, emotions, what it is like to be a sentient human: experiencing joy, laughter and sadness, to realise we are vulnerable, that we have our failings, we do bad things, but we are capable of forgiveness, kindness and love.”
WILLIAM YANG
“By combining photographs with words in his award-winning slide projection monologues, he expands on the context of his images and avoids the risk of cliché,” notes Michael Reid OAM. “Sadness (1992) recounts the grief his family felt after the 1922 murder of his uncle, paralleled with the loss experienced by the gay community during the AIDS crisis. These monologues have been presented at major festivals and venues in Australia, Europe, and North America, blending image, memory, and live narration to create a deeply affecting form of documentary theatre.”
Yang began 2025 with Milestone at the Sydney Festival – a performance marking his 80th birthday that drew on his vast archive of photographs and interwove them with personal reminiscence. Radiating his trademark warmth, humour and candour, Milestone was hailed by The Sydney Morning Herald as “a body of work that speaks a universal language, inviting us to forget about those differences that are only skin deep and reflect on the things that are truly important.” A creative triumph and deeply moving, Milestone set the tone for a year of milestones – from his solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin to the announcement of his ongoing European representation, establishing 2025 as a defining chapter in his brilliant career.
“Prior to our representation of William in Berlin, it had always been a not-so-secret thrill of mine to be photographed by William, while running about Sydney,” says Michael Reid OAM. “As this country’s foremost documentarian, the entire archive of William’s practice is heading to the State Library of New South Wales. Should William capture your photograph, you will live on for hundreds of years within a prestigious museum. William can make people almost live forever.”
Michael Reid Berlin thrilled to present the first major international survey for award-winning Tehran-born, Eora/Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist Nasim Nasr. Drawing together poignant, politically urgent and visually arresting photographs from key bodies of work, Nasr’s first solo show with Michael Reid opens as she embarks on the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris, awarded by Creative Australia, and will trace the themes that have woven through her practice over the past decade.
Since completing her Master of Visual Arts (Research) at the University of South Australia in 2011, Nasr’s work has sought to express symmetry or counterbalance – a form of harmony – between the cultural and intellectual separation of West and East, exploring, as she says, “how they can come together in one image, in one performance … how they might reject each other, as well as complete each other.” Working across photography, video, performance, sound and sculpture, she highlights the lived experience of cultural difference in her past and present homelands.
A finalist in this year’s Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Nasr previously received the People’s Choice Award in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Australia’s most prestigious photography prize. Her works have been shown across Australia and abroad – most recently at Photo London – and are held in major collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Powerhouse Museum, Artbank and the Parliament House Art Collection.
Alongside final editions of historical photographs, available works will include Nasr’s sinuous glass sculptures – reinterpretations of ashkdan, or Persian “tear-pots”, historically crafted by women of the Qajar dynasty as vessels for grief and resilience.
PUBLIC CELEBRATION
In Conversation with Nasim Nasr
Saturday, 29 November, 2pm
Michael Reid Berlin | Ackerstraße 163
10115 Berlin, Germany
The artist will be present.
Michael Reid Berlin is delighted to announce our first solo exhibition with Naarm/Melbourne-based contemporary artist Scotty So, one of the most exciting and distinctive voices in Australian contemporary art.
Described by Art Collector magazine in an expansive 2024 cover profile as “perhaps Australia’s most in-demand performance artist,” So works across various media – including photography, painting, sculpture, ceramics, video, installation and drag performance – to transform found, familiar and culturally resonant references into fictive and fabulous imagery that reflects on identity, performance and lived experience.
So’s work is represented in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, where he has featured in several landmark exhibitions, including the 2020 NGV Triennial, China: The Past is Present (2022), QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection (2022) and Melbourne Now (2023).
In 2024, the Art Gallery of Ballarat staged a major solo exhibition, debuting his Hai Kot Tou series alongside the newly commissioned video work Begonia Queens. Represented in Australia by MARS Gallery, he has also exhibited internationally with presentations in Hong Kong, China and Europe.
For his Berlin debut, So will present a selection of photographs from his 2022 Shungay series, which pools influences from Asian erotic painting, European Chinoiserie, Instagram makeup culture and contemporary gay identity. Within these richly staged portraits, clothing styles of the Song and Ming dynasties appear alongside allusions to folk tales such as the rabbit deity and the split peach, as well as queer cinematic touchstones including M. Butterfly – layering history, artifice and mythology in images that are playful yet precise, and deeply resonant.
All works are now available to preview and acquire by request.
Michael Reid Berlin is delighted to present a luminous new solo exhibition by acclaimed contemporary photographer Luke Shadbolt, a star in our stable of represented artists, who returns to the German capital this August.
Titled After Turner, this bold, chromatic new suite of photographs marks a striking evolution in Shadbolt’s practice, inspired by the radical romanticism of J.M.W. Turner.
Photographed over a single late-summer evening, After Turner reflects Shadbolt’s deep fascination with natural phenomena, focusing his lens on a fleeting and fiery interplay of light, water and atmosphere. Physically and conceptually immersed in his subject, the artist employed slow-shutter techniques within an underwater housing to capture images that blur the line between photography and painting.
“In this series, I’ve tried to accentuate the painterly capabilities of the photographic medium,” says Shadbolt, who cites Turner’s experimental brilliance – particularly his vivid, emotive colour – as a key influence.
Working in dialogue with Goethe’s colour theory and Turner’s expressive legacy, After Turner is at once homage and innovation – a contemporary meditation on light, violence, transcendence and the sublime.
Please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au
What were some of your earliest creative influences?
I remember having the classic Van Gogh and Monet posters in our house. I was really into Hieronymus Bosch as a kid, too. I’m not entirely sure how I was introduced to him, but I loved drawing monsters and dinosaurs, so that seemed like a pretty epic version of that. Drawing cartoons of an afternoon – Rugrats and The Simpsons – that’s another core memory. I remember a book we had on how to take care of your pet, and there was a photograph of a puppy in there that I was obsessed with. I must have drawn it dozens of times.
I’d say my mum influenced me the most. She was a teacher and would always have craft activities, paints or some sort of creative pursuit for me to try out. I remember she brought home oil paints one time, and an instructional manual on how to paint an “Australian landscape”. I think I was 12 maybe, but I still vividly remember the smell of the paint and turps and canvas. I still have that painting somewhere. There were a lot of inspiring people from where I grew up, too. Ryan Heywood, Nick Macarthur, the whole “Outskirts” group.
Dustin Humphrey was my biggest inspiration for surf photography when I first started out, though I’d say why I was drawn to him was because he was more of a landscape photographer, really. There was also Jon Frank, Trent Mitchell and Phil Gallagher. I was a big fan of Richard Bailey’s fashion work; he seemed to really champion the landscape as well. At some point, I was also introduced to Turner and Twombly and reintroduced to Monet, all of whom I became completely enamoured by. Impressionism and the abstract expressionists were probably the two most influential movements that inform my practice.
What was the starting point for your new series, After Turner?
It was, in essence, an attempt to mimic the sort of effects Turner would achieve in paint, with a camera. I’d been playing around with slow shutter for a few years, starting back when I was still photographing surfing. It wasn’t a direct reference to Turner back then, mind you, but more because I thought showing the movement of waves and people riding them was a poetic way of illustrating what is so much more than just a sport.
Shooting slow shutter also adds an element of chance to the act of taking the photograph, which added a layer of excitement. A similar feeling to what you get from shooting film, in a way, the anticipation and unknown result. That was the starting point, really. I thought there was a lot of room for comparable outcomes. Lots of trial and error, mostly error.
What aspects of Turner’s work appealed to you?
The way he creates a sense of movement really speaks to me. It captures the frenetic energy of watching waves crash against a cliff top or, in his case, a sailing ship.
What were some of the challenges of the series and how did you resolve them?
Photographing in the water is always fun; it’s what got me into photography in the first place. Shooting from a water housing is a little tricky, but otherwise, the major challenge was just waiting for the right lighting conditions.
I remember that afternoon well; I’d met my friend for a surf, but the waves weren’t all that good. The lighting conditions, however, were pretty magical. A storm on the horizon, clear skies behind me, an intense orange sunset glow. The real challenge is knowing the environmental conditions and also being available when they present themselves.
How did the series evolve through the process of shooting, editing and producing it?
I guess the most interesting thing is these images were photographed back in 2020. I’m never in a rush to edit my photographs. At the time, I was awaiting the arrival of my firstborn, it was the early stages of Covid and, without knowing it, I was bookending a time in my life that right now, in hindsight, I can barely comprehend. I’d checked the waves to see if it was worth going for a surf, and I noticed the bank of clouds forming overhead. I opted for a swim instead and grabbed my water housing, thinking it looked like an interesting sunset. I’ve got another baby (8 months old, absolute legend) and so there is a bit of a mirroring effect by releasing these images now.
How does the series build on the ideas and approaches of your work to date?
It’s an extension of what has come before. My last series was also heavily influenced by Turner, but I would say not as direct. It’s been nice working with a bit more colour this time, and for it not to be so much about the waves and swell as it is about the light. I do hope it offers a window into the sublime, though that’s my subjective view. It’s more interesting keeping it open to interpretation. I’ve been working on expanding into different mediums, so hopefully there’ll be an opportunity to present that work in the near future.
