Spanning the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, this private art collection from Perth, Western Australia, has been steadily assembled over the past twenty years.

The purpose of this collection has been to delight and intrigue its owner. How each artist delved into their subject has been of central importance to their acquisition. The use of the entire surface, the subject, the play of negative space, and the artist’s unique technique were all carefully considered and contrasted prior to acquisition. Chosen for their strength as art museum–quality examples, the works were selected for their artistic merit rather than the prominence of their makers’ signatures. Each artwork has been appraised as a fine example of its period. Every piece has been collected with an eye for the object itself—not, as can often be the case, in the spirit of the trophy collector who pursues a signature above all else.

After decades of collecting with vigour and curiosity, the collector–now in a downsizing phase–has decided to release a portion of the collection to the market. This presents a rare opportunity to acquire fresh and compelling artworks that would sit comfortably within any art museum or private collection.

Please consider.

– Michael Reid OAM

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

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present a specially curated companion exhibition to The Stars Before Us All – our upcoming exhibition of contemporary First Nations art in Washington, D.C. Ahead of our show’s opening in the US capital on Wednesday, 15 October, Michael Reid Sydney’s expansive presentation of The Stars Before Us All is now unfolding across the entire exhibition space at our flagship gallery in Chippendale and will continue concurrently with our stateside survey throughout October.

This significant group exhibition offers local collectors and gallery visitors the opportunity to experience and acquire extraordinary new and historical work by more than 15 luminaries of contemporary First Nations art at a watershed moment during which their practice is being celebrated on the international stage.

Reflecting the project’s international scope, the Eora/Sydney edition of The Stars Before Us All supports the gallery’s ambition to embed First Nations art within a globe-spanning network of collectors, curators and institutions, joining the cross-cultural dialogue forged by the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark touring exhibition The Stars We Do Not See, which will travel across North America over the next two years following its debut at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Echoing the work of the NGV and the National Gallery of Art, The Stars Before Us All highlights practising First Nations artists and key historical works, offering a contemporary complement to the NGV’s sweeping institutional survey. The Eora/Sydney edition of The Stars Before Us All is anchored by a significant suite of historical works by Regina Pilawuk Wilson, who will travel to Washington, D.C. this month as the guest of honour at our opening celebration for The Stars Before Us All – the first occasion for her to visit the room named in her honour at the Australian Embassy to the United States.

Joining Wilson in the exhibition’s local contingent is Kuninjku artist Owen Yalandja, who was awarded the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award at this year’s Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, as well as Yankunytjatjara artist and three-time Wynne Prize finalist Betty Chimney, Yolŋu artist Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa and many more. The exhibition also features a sublime painting by the late visionary Emily Kam Kngwarray, whose career-spanning retrospective is currently on view at the Tate Modern in London, and a work by the late Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori.

To discuss works from The Stars Before Us All, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au

From the time of her first exhibition in 1925 Margaret Preston established herself as the most important artist printmaker working in Australia. The exhibition received critical and popular acclaim. It was described in the press as ‘a riot of colour’ and sold exceptionally well. The most desirable works were those dealing with Australian flora; Preston hand-coloured them in gouache which enabled her to exploit the effects of vibrant, saturated colours. Her work quickly became iconic, being illustrated in journals like Art in Australia and The Home and being acquired by public galleries.  The exhibition also marked the beginning of Preston’s commitment to the development of a national Australian art.

This important group of eight prints span the most productive years of Preston’s involvement with woodblock printmaking – ranging from her 1925 exhibition until 1939.

In Native flowers (1925), an arrangement of flannel flowers, Sturt desert peas and Christmas bells in a blue bowl, the flowers have a jewel-like quality, appearing vibrant against the solid black background. This was one of the best-known prints from the 1925 exhibition following its reproduction on the cover of Art in Australia in December of that year.

Throughout the twenties Preston continued to experiment with still lives of native flowers, the compositions becoming bolder and more commanding. She also produced landscapes of the Sydney foreshore. When Preston settled in Sydney in 1920, she lived in the harbourside suburb of Mosman and went on to produce several prints which show her affection for this picturesque location. Mosman Bridge (1927), one such view, was selected by the artist to accompany her monograph Margaret Preston: Recent paintings 1929. All impressions of this print are slightly different. Preston was not interested in printing in colour, but hand coloured each print, the distribution of colour often varying, imparting each with its own vitality.

By the end of the decade Preston’s still life prints had become highly abstracted. Gum blossoms (1928) is one of the outstanding prints of this period, the artist carefully designing a floral arrangement with a pre-determined pictorial composition in mind. The subtly coloured round gum flowers and triangular leaves push out to the edges of the image, constrained by the rigid black lines that define the composition.    

In the early 1930s Preston moved to live in Berowra, a rural area surrounded by dense native bush. She was aged in her early sixties and was recovering from surgery. Prints produced by Preston after this time are all rare. Whereas in the early 1920s her editions usually numbered 50 or 25, later editions are small, numbering only two or three, and in many cases impressions are unique. This is the case with Old Banksia Tree (1939), one of Preston’s most important prints from her Berowra years. The tree was located at the bottom of her property, gnarled by age but still productive; Preston obviously identified with it (there is a photograph of her standing next to it).

In this impression, the woodcut is not hand-coloured, but the artist has introduced background tone that emphasises the isolation and vulnerability of the tree. Produced on the cusp of the Second World War it marked the end to Preston’s Berowra phase of her career.

Roger Butler AM

Emeritus Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

National Gallery of Australia

Michael Reid Sydney’s 2025 exhibition program culminates this month with the latest edition of Painting Now. Curated by Dean Phillips-Andersen, our annual group survey spotlights an exciting school of established contemporary painters from across Australia whose practices expand the creative possibilities of art’s most storied medium.

Painting Now 2025 presents significant new bodies of work by Columbiere Tipungwuti, Jo Chew, Heath Nock, Dhukumul Waṉambi and Brenton Drechsler. With their distinct approaches, perspectives and preoccupations, these artists recast painting as an expanded creative field, pushing the medium into optically charged, technically dazzling and conceptually daring terrain.

The success of so many Painting Now alumni reflects the program’s ambition to identify, mentor and celebrate singular talents at a moment of creative breakthrough, presenting their work just as it ascends to a new level of collectability and acclaim. Unfolding across the entire ground-floor gallery at our flagship Eora/Sydney space, Painting Now 2025 will be celebrated with opening drinks on Saturday, 6 December, and all works are available to explore and acquire online and by request.

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

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Eora/Sydney-based artist Louise Frith, who is making her debut in our flagship exhibition space after a stellar run of solo exhibitions at our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands galleries.

Building on the creative breakthrough of her widely celebrated Murrurundi shows Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries – as well as her recent collaboration with fashion brand Nancybird, which saw her elegant flannel flowers and other painted botanicals transposed onto textiles – Frith’s new works take us deeper into the thickets of the bushland covering Sydney’s North Head.

Moving with painterly gusto between areas of intricate, tightly controlled detail and an overall mood of untamed, impressionistic abundance, the artist’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and tangle right to the edge of each canvas.

Sketching out in the field before returning to her painting studio, Frith observes and translates North Head’s dense floral interplay, seasonal shifts, and the filtered patterns of light and shade cast across the forest floor.

The resulting paintings often read less as conventional landscapes than as exuberant, impressionistic fields of pattern-like flora that envelop and transport the viewer. Each work is at once precisely rendered, yet verging on abstraction, with overlapping forms and immersive, optically charged, tapestry-like effects.

To discuss works by Louise Frith, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present A Rhythm of Peaks and Flows – the latest solo exhibition from celebrated Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury-based contemporary painter Julz Beresford. A finalist in this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize and one of the most in-demand painters in our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s stable, Beresford returns to one of her most enduring subjects with this new series, capturing the epic peaks and winding waterways of the Snowy–Monaro region.

For Beresford, immersion in the landscape is an embodied act. “Being there gives you a sense of openness – your senses are alive, so you feel things rather than just look,” says the artist, who beautifully distils rugged alpine topography and shifting light with dramatic and expressive painterly sweeps of thick impasto paint and soft gradations of green. “These sensations are what I hold onto back in the studio. My gouache sketches remind me of how it felt. I have no fixed intention in the landscape; it’s about the feeling of being there.”

Back in her studio, Beresford translates those memories into moody canvases where sculptural brushwork and fluid gesture echo the rhythm of water and the pulse of the land. “You journey through a place just like you journey through a painting,” she says. “It’s a transfer of pure happiness – being lost in the moment, absorbed in nature.” A Rhythm of Peaks and Flows marks a new summit for Beserford as she pushes her practice towards ever-more heroic, expansive and immersive terrain. Now online and on view at Michael Reid Sydney, the exhibition continues until 29 November.

Julz Beresford joined the Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin stable of represented artists in 2024 after a successful exhibition career over many years at our Northern Beaches gallery.

To discuss works from A Rhythm of Peaks and Flows by Julz Beresford or sign up for first access to the artist’s forthcoming projects, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

This September, Michael Reid Sydney will present our second solo exhibition from Muloobinba/Newcastle-based interdisciplinary artist Michelle Gearin since she joined our stable of represented artists in early 2023. Returning to the gallery for the first time in more than two years, Gearin will present a sequence of large-scale paintings that mark an exciting new chapter in her evolving practice.

Gearin’s work invites the viewer to move beyond the material world into a lucid, otherworldly dimension. Her distinctive visual language draws from a deeply personal lexicon of references: from Shunga and Sanskrit Kama Sutra miniatures to 19th-century Symbolism. These influences converge with autobiography – fragments of memory, desire and transformation – resulting in paintings that are both intimate and elemental, charged with a kind of noirish eroticism, shapeshifting magic and mythic ambiguity.

Since her widely acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition Lux Aeterna, Gearin has exhibited extensively in institutional group shows, including Old Stories, New Magic at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, where her spellbinding, wall-sized installation was anchored by her most ambitious work to date: Metamorphosis. Her work has since been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat for its permanent collection, underscoring the growing momentum surrounding her practice and its growing resonance with both private collectors and public institutions.

Before joining Michael Reid, Gearin’s work was featured in several notable exhibitions, including Female Drivers (Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 2022), where her multi-panel work Prism – comprising 49 circular paintings – was acquired by the gallery. That same year, she exhibited alongside Alex Seton at The Lock-Up in Newcastle, presenting the multimedia installation Double Rainbow, which explored the science of optics and the perceptual mystery of the human eye.

To request a preview and gain priority access to works from Michelle Gearin’s forthcoming solo exhibition, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au.

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present our first exhibition from Naarm/Melbourne-based Indian-Australian artist Sid Pattni, who joined our stable of represented artists earlier this year and is currently a finalist in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Titled The Act of Putting It Back Together, Pattni’s solo exhibition debut will be celebrated with an opening event on Thursday, 31 July, 6–8pm.

Pattni first captured the attention of our chairman and director, Michael Reid OAM, when his work was shortlisted for the National Emerging Art Prize in 2024. “His paintings made me go wow,” says Michael. “But what elevated Pattni for me was his compelling exploration of Indian-Anglo colonisation and immigration to Australia – then and now.”

Born in London and raised in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth, Pattni says he first approached painting as a way to process the dissonance he felt navigating multiple cultural identities.​​​​ “I’m interested in how aesthetics shaped under empire can be reclaimed and reconfigured to tell new stories about migration, memory, and identity,” says the artist, whose work borrows and remixes elements from Mughal miniature paintings, Indian textiles, British botanical drawings and 19th-century Company Paintings.

“I return to themes of hybridity, belonging and erasure, referencing historical visual formats not as homage, but as a means of critique and reimagining.” Speaking with Belle magazine for a recent profile, the artist describes his latest series as a continuation of his engagement with colonial visual traditions.

“The floral borders, inspired by British botanical illustrations, are no longer literal – they’re invented, composite, almost dreamlike. They symbolise how cultural artefacts were appropriated and recontextualised during empire, and how these reinterpretations continue to influence diasporic self-perception. What feels new in this body of work is a deeper emotional intensity.” The Act of Putting It Back Together is a response to inherited ways of seeing and an invitation to look again – “more critically,” says Pattni.

For information and acquisition opportunities please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

While Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s monumental work Wupun (sun mat) remains on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a spectacular centrepiece of this year’s Sulman Prize, we are thrilled to announce that the senior Ngan’gikurrungurr artist and cultural leader has now completed a new collection of equally epic, colour-soaked canvases that will soon be on view in her next major solo show at Michael Reid Sydney.

Works from Wilson’s forthcoming exhibition have now arrived at our Eora/Sydney gallery, where they can be previewed in person or digitally by request. Please sign up to be the first to receive exclusive previews and priority access to Wilson’s extraordinary new paintings before her show’s official opening in early July.

Born in 1948 near Daly River, Northern Territory, Wilson is the cultural director of Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation and co-founder of the Peppimenarti community. Situated amid wetlands and floodplains at the centre of the Daly River Aboriginal Reserve, Peppimenarti is an important site for Ngan’gikurrungurr people and continues to inform Wilson’s art and weaving practices.

Realised on a truly spectacular scale, Wilson’s Sulman piece depicts wupun (sun mat), which are traditionally woven with yerrgi (pandanus) and merrepen (sand palm) for decorative use by the women of Peppimenarti.

Since winning the highest honour at the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Wilson has been a fixture on the contemporary art map. Her rhythmic, intricately detailed works are beloved globally and held in the collections of the British Museum, AGNSW, the NGV and QAGOMA. She has exhibited at LACMA in Los Angeles, the Moscow Biennale, the National Museum of the Arts in Washington, D.C. and numerous other important institutions across the globe.

For first access to works from the artist’s upcoming show, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present the latest solo exhibition from award-winning Dharawal/Wollongong-based contemporary painter India Mark. Titled A View With a View, this sublime collection of intimately scaled, exquisitely composed and tonally rich still-life paintings is now showing in our upstairs exhibition space and will be welcomed with an opening celebration on Thursday, 19 June, 6–8pm.

“The beauty of painting still life is that there are endless possibilities, even when your subject material is limited,” says the artist, who cites 20th-century still-life maestro Giorgio Morandi among her enduring creative influences. Like Morandi, Mark delights in returning to simple and familiar objects, treating these repetitions as a chance to look closer – to hone in on nuanced details and subtle variations in light and colour. “There are certain objects in this series that I have painted many times; I will never tire of painting them.”

This project of refinement through close observation and a return to familiar forms was the animating force of Mark’s new series, coupled with the influence of A Dictionary of Colour Combinations by 20th-century Japanese artist, teacher and kimono designer Sanzo Wada. “This series has been a way of returning to aspects of still life I have explored before and really loved; the objects, colours and compositions are all things I intentionally wanted to revisit.”

Since her solo debut, Night Music, which followed the announcement of her representation by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin, Mark has continued to amass a passionate following with a succession of accolades and group showings such as Light & Life at Tweed Regional Gallery and Tender at Ngununggula. She has been a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and the Portia Geach Memorial Award, and is the recipient of the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize and The Lester Prize (Emerging).

Alongside her studio practice, Mark also lectures in observational drawing and painting at the University of Wollongong. “[This] has allowed me to strip my understanding of painting back to the essentials,” she says. “It’s helped me to be more spontaneous with my own painting. I’ve become more comfortable with experimentation.”

Now, the creative breakthrough sparked by these recent experiences has culminated with A View With a View – a series Mark sees as a homecoming of sorts, albeit with the renewed confidence of an artist whose practice is going from strength to strength.

“I used to work on pairs of paintings simultaneously. Painting two works was a great way of creating nice conversations between the works,” says the artist. “For some reason, I stopped working this way for a while, and I missed those dialogues and connections between separate paintings. For this show, I decided to only work this way, painting pairs and trios of paintings that related directly to each other.”

Mark notes that two favourites from her series – both featuring glass surfaces – are works that at first posed challenges before leading to a shift in her point of view. “The way I paint glass is quite awkward; it’s not my strength in painting, and I think I love these particular works because I actually like the awkwardness of the glass objects,” she explains. “Awkwardness is a funny and persistent element of painting that I used to try to avoid. Now I have an affection for it.”

To discuss works from A View With a View by India Mark, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au