We are delighted to announce that the next presentation in Michael Reid Sydney’s upstairs exhibition space will be a homecoming of sorts for Mai Nguyễn-Long. After an impressive trifecta of large-scale offsite projects – at QAGOMA, John Curtin Gallery and Michael Reid Murrurundi – the multidisciplinary artist will return to our Eora/Sydney gallery in May for her first solo show since her 2023 debut.

Works from Nguyễn-Long’s self-titled solo exhibition – her second at Michael Reid Sydney since joining our stable of represented artists – will be available to preview and acquire by request in the lead-up to our opening celebration on Thursday, 15 May. This installation will include a suite of the artist’s Vomit Girl sculptures from her monumental assemblage Doba Nation, which debuted at John Curtin Gallery as the centrepiece of this year’s Perth Festival program.

Nguyễn-Long’s Vomit Girl figures first emerged through her artistic and scholarly practice from a feeling of voicelessness. “The recurring motif came from a sense of being erased: having no identity, language, or voice to speak with,” says the artist, whose practice lends expressive form to ineffable aspects of diasporic experience, materialising her attempt to mend what feels irreparably broken.

Reflecting on the messy edges of history, family and cultural identity, these Vomit Girl figures draw together like a sprawling archipelago, appearing playful yet resilient as they engage in their imaginary conversations. Nguyễn-Long’s Michael Reid Sydney installation will be on view concurrently with her sprawling, room-sized commission for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, The Vomit Girl Project, which now has an extended run at QAGOMA until Sunday, 13 July.

“Among the works that merit – and reward – prolonged viewing [is] Mai Nguyễn-Long’s ceramic arrangement, The Vomit Girl Project,” writes Sophia Cai in her Freize magazine review of APT11. “Nguyễn-Long’s array of uncanny hand-built ceramics referencing Vietnamese mythology elicits totemic interpretations, blending contemporary body horror with questions of cultural identity.”

To request a preview and priority access to sculptures from Mai Nguyễn-Long’s forthcoming solo show at Michael Reid Sydney, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

“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. “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 further information regarding 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

Humming with energy and rich in gestural form, Carly Le Cerf’s newest paintings will make their debut mid year at Michael Reid Sydney. This highly anticipated exhibition is the artist’s first Sydney presentation in two years, and pre-registration for acquisition is essential.

A small selection of new Carly Le Cerf paintings are available to acquire immediately. For information regarding these paintings, please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

A magnificent series of new paintings by senior Yankunytjatjara artist Betty Chimney will be on view in September at Michael Reid Sydney. A three-time AGNSW Wynne Prize finalist, Chimney is at the forefront of the innovative, exuberant, globally acclaimed new wave of First Nations painters working at Iwantja Arts.

To discuss priority access to paintings in this exhibition please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Paintings by Australia’s most senior female contemporary First Nations artist, Regina Pilawuk Wilson will grace the Sydney Gallery in 2025. A senior Ngan’gikurrungurr artist, NATSIAA winner and cultural director of Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation, Wilson is internationally celebrated, collected and is represented by important institutional collections across the world.

To discuss priority access to paintings in this exhibition please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Scott Perkins returns to Michael Reid Sydney in April 2025 with a new series of expertly crafted photographs and light boxes. Located within photography and sculpture disciplines, Perkins’s treatment of the photographic medium is precisely engineered and highly original.

Presented in three distinct modes, his images of unidentified landscapes have been captured in a state of balance, occupying a space between light and dark. Brooding, atmospheric and technically imposing, Perkins’s images are a dynamic viewing experience.

In this exhibition, viewers will be treated to impeccably presented light-box photographs of bespoke design that transform their surrounding spaces. The artist’s use of Hanhnemule metallic paper add a complementary lustre to the surface of his mysterious still photographic images.

For information, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present Seeking a Silk Purse, the latest solo exhibition from leading contemporary painter Andrea Huelin. One of the bright stars in our stable of represented artists and the winner of the 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize, Huelin seeks to capture the elusive qualities of light and lustre with an economy of loose and exuberant gestures.

Seeking a Silk Purse is a dazzling painterly ode to the pleasures of a collecting life and the thrill of trawling for treasures in op shops, antiques emporiums and Aladdin’s caves. Widely celebrated for her vibrant, evocative and gently expressive still-life paintings, Huelin has now completed some of her largest works to date, conjuring interiors and tablescapes that heave with wonderfully eclectic objects and coloured-glass vessels that glisten like jewels right to the edge of her newly expanded canvas.

Huelin deftly imbues each of her scenes with character and emotion, breathing life into the inanimate objects she depicts. This vitality is richly evident even in the absence of the human subjects that lend such immense appeal to her portraits – including her ebullient tribute to the beloved comedian Cal Wilson, which garnered one of Australia’s most keenly contested creative accolades.

Last year, Huelin relocated her practice from the tropical climes of sunny Far North Queensland to an ex-industrial space amid the grittier, bohemian hubbub of Naarm/Melbourne’s inner west. For an artist so deeply attuned to the nuances of light – and whose subject matter is gleaned from local op shops and often nested with bits of biographical detail – this change of scenery can be immediately felt in her work’s mood and sensibilities.

In Seeking a Silk Purse, the light feels moodier, the tones richer, the atmosphere more cloistered and decidedly Melburnian than before. A spectacular and sumptuous rebuke to the anaemic minimalism of an excessively decluttered post-Kondo world, these works celebrate the emotional pull and totemic, transportive power of vintage objects amassed in a spirit of eclecticism and abundance.

Delighting in the happy accidents of the collecting impulse run gloriously amok, Huelin’s more-is-more jumble of tchotchkes and curios, tableware and trinkets, lava lamps and kitchen accoutrements, has been brought to life with a vibrancy and exuberance befitting the maximalist MO of the spaces she paints and the air of history, theatricality and character they contain.

The artist’s paean to the pursuit of collecting – of being surrounded by objects through which we might access past lives – remains grounded in her sensitivity to light in the here-and-now and her close observations of its delicate, fleeting effects. With her graceful gestures and masterly application of colour, Huelin bottles an ephemeral interplay of shadows, refractions, translucency and luminosity that enriches her joyous windows into teeming treasure troves.

Works from Seeking a Silk Purse by Andrea Huelin have arrived at Michael Reid Sydney and can be viewed and acquired by request. To request a preview, secure an acquisition, book an in-person viewing or RSVP for the opening event, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

The next presentation in the upstairs gallery at Michael Reid Sydney will be our first solo exhibition from Eora/Sydney-based painter Kathy Liu, who previously dazzled audiences as one of the stars of our annual survey show Painting Now.

“My approach is highly intuitive,” says Liu, speaking with Belle magazine for a profile published in the lead-up to Painting Now. “I begin a painting without a pre-set concept, letting the colours and shapes emerge. Sometimes, it feels like I’m there to help the artworks find their own storylines.”

This open-ended process makes the canvas a conduit for fabulous adventures through imaginative worlds, inviting delightfully unexpected turns as amorphous pools begin to coalesce and playfully enigmatic, inchoate figures appear through diaphanous wafts of colour.

“It reflects my subconscious mind, bringing up narratives from my past life that I have almost forgotten,” says Liu. “Lost memories of childhood, my love of mythology, some distant lines of poetry, all of these are unburied through my work.” Like hazy memories or half-remembered dreams, the resulting works feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement.

From a smattering of stars and harlequin prints to crescent moons and cuddly creatures, figurative elements bubble up through ethereal, overlapping layers, recalling a sense of childlike innocence and unfettered imagination. But, as with the circus paintings of Chagall and Picasso – both cited by the artist as influences – there could be a tinge of melancholy or menace inside these dreamy scenes.

The ephemerality of childhood amusements is echoed by a gossamer quality that sees fragmentary images on the cusp of emerging or just fading away – an ambiguity that rhymes with Liu’s fluid approach and the serendipitous possibilities of her abstract practice.

After her celebrated showing in a stellar run of group exhibitions and her solo debut, Moon Phases, at Michael Reid Murrurundi, Liu’s upcoming presentation will be a chance for collectors to discover work from an exciting talent at a pivotal moment in her career.

For all enquiries, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au