Celebrated Meanjin/Brisbane-based contemporary painter and master of the still life John Honeywill returns to Michael Reid Sydney in August for his first solo exhibition in more than two years. Brought to life with meticulous precision and masterly control of light and mood, Honeywill’s paintings set everyday objects within deceptively simple compositions that appear quietly radiant and seemingly lit from within.

His acclaimed practice is propelled by a curious, almost ineffable affinity for the objects of his gaze – unsentimental yet emotionally resonant subjects that draw the eye with the quiet authority of their presence. From sugary sweets to elegant vessels enclosing fruit or delicately unfolding flowers, these still-life elements exude a serene stillness and subtle alchemy as they coalesce and converse in graceful, mesmerising arrangements.

By suspending these objects against ambiguous, softly luminescent planes – at times subtly reflective, at others gauze-like and atmospheric – and rendering them with astonishing, ultra-precise detail, Honeywill heightens their sense of poise and intimacy. His paintings stand as a paean to the interplay between an object’s presence and the artist’s perception – the organising idea behind his 2023 monograph, Presence and Perception.

To sign up for first access to the artist’s forthcoming series, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and 2025 Archibald Prize finalist Sid Pattni will follow up a banner year with a new succession of projects across the Michael Reid network and beyond – commencing in April with his first large-scale solo exhibition staged across our flagship ground-floor gallery, followed by his Michael Reid Berlin debut.

Born in London and raised in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth, the Indian-Australian artist first approached painting as a way of processing the dissonance of navigating multiple cultural identities. Arriving at an entirely original painterly language, Pattni draws on visual traditions codified and co-opted under empire – from Mughal miniature painting and Indian textiles to British botanical drawings and 19th-century Company Paintings – recasting their compositional logic as symbols of containment and their intricate embellishment as a site of critique.

In his hands, colonial portraiture becomes a lens for exploring diasporic identity and the external projections through which selfhood is constructed. A breakout star of the 2023 National Emerging Art Prize, Pattni joined the Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin stable in the same week he was announced as an Archibald finalist for his self-portrait subtitled The Act of Putting It Back Together, which later lent its name to his tremendously successful Michael Reid Sydney debut.

“Pattni invites us to examine the inheritances that exist within the subconscious of our collective and individual psyche,” writes Louise Martin-Chew in an eight-page Vault magazine cover story. “His criticality sits within an aesthetic that is richly decorated, beautiful and seductive, to ‘symbolise how cultural artefacts were appropriated and recontextualised during empire, and how these reinterpretations continue to influence diasporic self-perception. What feels new … is a deeper emotional intensity.”

To preview and acquire works from Sid Pattni’s forthcoming Eora/Sydney and Berlin exhibitions, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

In February, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin will present our first full-scale solo exhibition from Yankunytjatjara artist Raylene Walatinna. A major force within the dynamic school of First Nations painters at Iwantja Arts in the rocky desert country of Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, Walatinna is the daughter and frequent collaborator of acclaimed artist Betty Chimney, as well as an exceptional talent in her own right.

The mother–daughter duo often works together on collaborative paintings, continuing the custom of older women passing on their knowledge of Tjukurpa (cultural stories) and Ngura (Country) to younger generations. As a solo artist, Walatinna produces only a limited volume of work, making her forthcoming exhibition – her most ambitious project to date – a truly significant occasion.

Revealing the influence of her trailblazing mother – a three-time Wynne Prize finalist and one of the most highly regarded artists represented by the gallery – Walatinna’s work channels the rich tones and elemental rhythms of the desert in a celebration of her family’s enduring connection to Country and Yankunytjatjara cultural history.

Her forthcoming solo exhibition follows a star turn in Heirloom, our Murrurundi gallery’s most recent collaborative exhibition with Country Style magazine, as well as a celebrated showing alongside several of her Iwantja Arts peers in the group exhibition Ngura pilunpa – Peaceful Country at Michael Reid Southern Highlands. “My mum has always been my closest friend. I learnt how to paint from her – she is a very good teacher. Over time, I’ve developed my own way of working too,” says Walatinna in a profile published in Country Style’s 2025 Art Issue alongside the opening of Heirloom. “My paintings are different to my mum’s – even though we are often painting the same Country. Our shapes usually connect in different ways, and we have different ideas on how to use colour.”

Both artists begin with the Tjukitji (soakage) and the Iwantja Creek, sites of profound importance to Yankunytjatjara people. “It is a landscape that’s deeply embedded in their family history,” writes Hannah James in Country Style. “Raylene recalls travelling as a child while her father worked as a stockman at various cattle stations.”

Works from Raylene Walatinna’s forthcoming presentation are now available to preview digitally and in person by request. To receive a preview catalogue, book a private viewing at Michael Reid Sydney or register early acquisition interest, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Sydney will commence our 2026 exhibitions program with the most ambitious project to date from Eora/Sydney-based contemporary painter Kathy Liu. Now available to preview digitally and in person by request, Liu’s new series takes the title Odyssey both as a nod to the Classical Greco-Roman inflections of the curious, inchoate forms that play out within her abstract compositions – figures that slowly cohere through gossamer clouds of colour, lending her large-scale paintings the feeling of a faded fresco or timeworn tapestry – and to the open-ended process that produced them. For Liu, this approach is another odyssey of sorts, embracing the serendipitous digressions and chance encounters that emerge through her painterly wanderings.

“None were preplanned,” says the artist, whose forthcoming solo exhibition will be her first to unfold across our entire flagship ground-floor space. “Instead of letting the idea lead to action, I reversed this, beginning with action, letting myself embark on a personal odyssey, a wander towards the notion of an idea. It’s almost like a jack-in-the-box, full of surprises, and I enjoy surprising myself.” Awash with an almost celestial luminosity, Odyssey represents a confident and sophisticated honing of Liu’s singular vision and technique, even while her methods remain open to the unexpected, ethereal and ineffable possibilities of an intuitive abstract practice – a process likened to “a game of chance” in a 2024 Belle magazine profile.

“What might begin as an exercise in loose, tonal abstraction can take a delightfully unexpected turn as amorphous pools begin to coalesce and playfully enigmatic, inchoate figures emerge through diaphanous wafts of colour,” noted the Belle story. “Redolent of hazy memories, nocturnal musings or half-remembered dreams, the resulting compositions feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement.”

Discussing her Odyssey series, Liu says she imagines her paintings as a visual analogue to stream-of-consciousness writing – bringing another literary dimension to a series that feels imbued, albeit with delightful ambiguities, with gestures to classical tales, epic narratives and oral histories held in the mind’s eye. “Just as our thought processes are very rarely linear and defined, my works, an introspective reflection of the subconscious mind, don’t present clearly bound storylines,” says the artist. “Instead, I would like to invite my audience to wander through the paintings, to explore the potential narratives within them.”

To sign up for early previews and first access to works from Odyssey by Kathy Liu – or book a private viewing before the 2025 Christmas holidays – please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

A major highlight of the official artistic program at the 2026 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival, Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti opens in February at Michael Reid Sydney and marks the Tiwi Islands artist and dancer’s first large-scale solo exhibition since his star turn in our annual survey Painting Now.

Set to walk alongside the Sistagirls in the 2026 Mardi Gras Parade, Tipungwuti is a significant presence within the Tiwi Islands community and an artist whose highly distinctive painting practice continues to draw strong institutional and collector interest across Australia and abroad.

Tipungwuti’s Murrakupupuni (Country) is Wurankuwu, a homeland inherited through his father’s family, while his tribe, Wulinjuwula (Mosquito), comes from his matrilineal line. Having performed ballet in Eora/Sydney in the 1980s, he is also an accomplished dancer. “My father danced Jarranga (buffalo) and my mother danced Ampiji (rainbow),” says Tipungwuti, who continues to perform at ceremony and events where there is yoyi (dance). “My totem is buffalo, but when some of those women who are related through my mother’s side dance Ampiji, I join in, too.”

Across his striking monochrome works on bark and canvas, Tipungwuti depicts the celestial figures at the heart of Tiwi ceremonial culture: Japarra, the moon-man who brought mortality into the world, and japalinga, the stars whose ochred forms adorn dancers during ceremony and yoyi. “I paint Japarra because I want to tell that story from long ago – what he did on earth and keep that story going,” says the artist. The story recounts Japarra’s encounter with Purukuparli and Wai-ai, the death of their child, and his ascent to the sky, where his white light reminds the Tiwi people of the cycle of life and death.

“In parlingarri – old time – Japarra saw the family out bush; the baby died from the sun, and Japarra wanted to take him up for three days and bring him back alive. But the father said, ‘Karlu’ – ‘no’. After fighting, Japarra flew up and stayed in the sky to become the moon and look down on the whole world. Now everyone around the world can’t come back; they must follow that father and his son and die when it is their time.”

Rendered in stark black and white, the ancestral moon-man appears, by turns, solemn, playful and elemental; his face endlessly compelling. “Japarra is white – the moon-man has a white body. All the stars are white and the moon is white too,” Tipungwuti explains of his palette, made from white ochre collected on Country at Wurankuwu. “I want to share my story and the story of my painting with people from all over the world.”

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Tipungwuti’s work was shown to great acclaim in 2025 at UNSW Galleries in Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New, curated by José Da Silva with Jilamara Arts.

“In years gone by, there was a strong Tiwi tradition of producing nude figurative ironwood carvings that tell [Japarra’s] story,” writes cultural critic and researcher Tristen Harwood. “Tipungwuti’s paintings draw on these important cultural influences to create innovative works grounded in his knowledge of the old stories and connection to longstanding practices of storytelling.”

Works from Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti will be available to preview and acquire in the lead-up to the show’s opening in February as part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival. For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Having trained in the classical tenets of still-life oil painting, Mulubinba/Newcastle-based painter Heath Nock now takes an iconoclast’s approach to the genre, expanding its field of vision to encompass found images from the cultural past and treating this eclectic source material as objects to be observed, dissected and remade with a still-life painter’s eye.

Nock applies the techniques of the Dutch masters to fragments of vintage advertising, old photographs and print ephemera – giving painterly weight to images once fleetingly consumed. “Using photos and advertising, cropping to create a new story with a sense of ambiguity,” he explains, “I want the viewer to question the work and be lost in the moment.”

Across his Painting Now series, these reframed relics become the “stuff of life” – playful, nostalgic and laced with irreverence. Nock’s intriguingly cropped, close-up compositions flirt with the language of mid-century magazines and 1970s leisure culture: suntanned bodies hog the frame, childhood snapshots are steeped in a halcyon glow, cigarette models offer a wink of louche, macho laconicism from a time when vice was aspirational. In the artist’s hands, this imagery is both homage and subtle critique – a witty meditation on how masculinity, desire and memory are staged and sold.

Following a landmark year that included a residency in Germany’s prestigious Young Artist Residency Weidingen and an acclaimed exhibition at UTS Gallery, Nock’s first showing with Michael Reid Sydney displays a thrilling expansion of his painterly vocabulary. What begins as an act of appropriation arrives as something more intimate and evocative – a portrait not of the figures he paints, but of the images themselves, newly luminous, transportive and alive.

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

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

Yirrkala-based artist Dhukumul Waṉambi brings ancestral songlines into motion with Marrakulu Monuk – an animated digital painting that translates her clan’s sacred saltwater miny’tji into luminous, swirling form. “Instead of painting Marrakulu Monuk onto bark with ochres, I wanted to make it digital while staying true to our traditions,” says the artist, who works as a filmmaker and digital artist with The Mulka Project.

Using a self-made digital brush that mimics the fine marwat of Yolŋu bark painting, Waṉambi animates the infinite movement of her Marrakulu homeland’s waters at Gurka’wuy. “My father inspired me to make paintings like this,” she notes of the late artist and cultural leader Mr Waṉambi. “He was the first to take miny’tji that are normally painted onto bark and burial poles, and make them move.”

By transposing cultural knowledge and a time-honoured visual language into the digital realm, Waṉambi continues her father’s legacy of artistic innovation – a mantle shared by her sister, award-winning contemporary artist Gaypalani Waṉambi – and embodies the experimental spirit of Painting Now.

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

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

Columbiere Tipungwuti paints the celestial figures of Tiwi ceremonial culture – Japarra, the moon-man who brought mortality to the world, and japalinga, the stars whose ochred forms adorn dancers’ bodies in ceremony and yoyi. “I paint Japarra because I want to tell that story from long ago – what he did on earth and keep that story going,” says the artist. The story tells of Japarra’s fateful encounter with Purukuparli and Wai-ai, which led to the death of their child and Japarra’s ascent to the sky, where his white light reminds the Tiwi people of the cycles of life and death.

“In parlingarri – old time – Japarra saw the family out bush; the baby died from the sun, and Japarra wanted to take him up for three days and bring him back alive. But the father said, ‘Karlu’ – ‘no’. After fighting, Japarra flew up and stayed in the sky to become the moon and look down on the whole world. Now everyone around the world can’t come back; they must follow that father and his son and die when it is their time.”

On bark and canvas, Tipungwuti renders the ancestral moon-man in stark black and white, his face striking, solemn and compelling. “Japarra is white – the moon-man has a white body. All the stars are white and the moon is white too,” he explains of his elemental palette, made from white ochre gathered on Country at Wurankuwu.

“I want to share my story and the story of my painting with people from all over the world,” says Tipungwuti, who also has a background in dance – performing ballet in Sydney in the 1980s and yoyi on the Tiwi Islands.

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Tipungwuti showed his paintings to great acclaim this year at UNSW Galleries in Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New, a widely celebrated exhibition curated by José Da Silva with Jilamara Arts. In Painting Now, Tipungwuti continues this lineage, transforming Tiwi creation stories into powerful, luminous images that bridge earth, sky and spirit.

“In years gone by, there was a strong Tiwi tradition of producing nude figurative ironwood carvings that tell [Japarra’s] story,” writes cultural critic and researcher Tristen Harwood. “Tipungwuti’s paintings draw on these important cultural influences to create innovative works grounded in his knowledge of the old stories and connection to longstanding practices of storytelling.”

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

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

In the painted worlds of Nipaluna/Hobart-based artist Jo Chew, built forms become vessels for an open-ended meditation on vulnerability, hopefulness, loss and longing. “A poem doesn’t need to describe everything and a song doesn’t need to make sense – I feel it can be the same with a painting,” says the artist, whose vibrant, sun-dappled paintings derive from collaged compositions; fragmentary photographs, drawings and found references spliced together “in the hope of finding something that speaks to me.”

This process achieves an almost trompe-l’œil effect, with her large-scale paintings retaining a collagistic sense of pictorial layering in space – an illusory interweaving of paper and paint, memory and material. In doing so, her practice breathes new life into the medium, in step with the curatorial ambitions of Painting Now.

Despite the work’s compelling ambiguities, themes slowly coalesce through Chew’s Painting Now series, in which house-like structures repeat in various guises and take on poetic resonance. Whether temporary and improvisational – tents and makeshift A-frames – or suggesting past visions of a future utopia – modernist dream houses and geodesic domes – her recurring pitched forms invoke a universal language of shelter, inviting reflections on our longing for refuge and a place to call home.

Brought to life during her final months in her long-term home, Chew’s exploration of how we dwell and what we treasure is tinged with a quiet acceptance of transience. “It doesn’t mean things or places can’t be treasured,” she says. “Just that nothing is really ours to keep.” The artist notes a nostalgic thread running through her constructed images: “A desire to get something back that we can’t quite retrieve,” she says. “But they’re not dark or depressing; I think there’s an appreciation for something from the past and an optimism that something similar might still be found. Many of my works this year have a feeling of something hidden and forming, suggesting a period of rest and reflection; cocoon-like, perhaps.”

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

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

South Australian contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler joins Painting Now 2025 with his most ambitious body of work to date. A two-time National Emerging Art Prize finalist who recently joined the stable of artists represented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Southern Highlands after a succession of sold-out solo shows at both spaces, Drechsler has taken Painting Now as an opportunity to significantly dial up his work’s scale and scope while honing the distinctive visual language for which he is already widely celebrated. On his largest canvases yet, Drechsler’s work attains a newly cinematic heft, deepening the ongoing dialogue between visibility and concealment – belonging and displacement – that emerges from his queer subjectivity and animates his visually dazzling, conceptually rich practice.

Within these expansive and arresting compositions, recurring motifs appear in deliberately “foreign” spaces: vintage cars, building facades and flashes of the artist’s trademark green-and-white stripe. “The stripes stand in for my physical self,” he says. “They take up space and attract attention – things that don’t come naturally to me.” That double movement – to stand out and blend in at once – threads through the series with quiet persistence.

A curatorial prompt to consider the visual language of auteurs such as Wes Anderson became a springboard for a bolder palette and dramatic sensibilities befitting the work’s broader scale. Here, punchy pinks and cardamom reds meet tender tonal harmonies, while precise drawing loosens into gestural passages; “mistakes” remain visible as signs of the artist’s hand. “Dean encouraged me to look at cinematic devices and framing,” says Drechsler. “It opened me up to composition in new ways – to big reds, saturated pinks and how colour can create mood.”

Drechsler describes these adventures in colour as both exciting and somewhat nerve-racking. “Are they too much?” he wonders. “Maybe. But that tension is part of what it means to make art as an emerging queer artist. The overarching message is that we all fit, wherever we are, and that we are valued and belong in any room we occupy. Painting taught me that.”

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

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.