Into The Distance assembles unreleased images from Narelle Autio‘s archive, pictures that were taken between 2003-2004 while on a road trip across Australia. Twenty years later, this exhibition precedes the forthcoming release of a major publication, one which provokes a conversation between Autio’s until now, very separate Watercolours and Outback photographs.

There will be ten key photographs on display that broadly encapsulate this period of Autio’s career, presented as one curated body of work. For the first time, photographs from two distinct periods of Narelle Autio’s career will collide. In addition, an installation of small prints will illuminate this entire period in compelling detail.

For private previews and acquisition enquiries, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Among the most adored and in-demand artists in the Michael Reid stable, Lucy Vader returns for her first solo exhibition at our Eora/Sydney gallery in four years.

A stunning suite of paintings that visually thread together to read as one continuous installation, Exaltation arrives after several successful presentations across our network – including at the most recent Sydney Contemporary – and will be celebrated with an opening reception on Thursday, 14 March.

A true iconoclast of pastoral painting, Vader’s deeply saturated scenes burst with energy, exuberance and vibrant undulations of paint, appearing as though they might momentarily break open to roiling undercurrents of pure colour that flow freely from one canvas to the next.

Reflecting her deep and enduring affinity for rural life, the artist imbues these bucolic pictures with dynamism and movement, evoking the landscape’s natural rhythms. As birds take flight against radiant skies and tumbling clouds, farm animals graze along rolling paddocks below.

Having moved to the Northern Rivers of NSW following the devastation of the 2022 floods, Vader’s visions of thick clouds bursting across heavenly skies read in Exaltation as an artist reaching for the sublime, while nodding to the resilience, grit and steely determination required to live and work in the country.

Private previews are currently being conducted at our Sydney Gallery ahead of the exhibition. To make an appointment, or to request a digital preview, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

The first solo exhibition from India Mark since joining our stable of represented artists, Night Music forms a sequence of perfectly composed, intimately formed still-life paintings that shift between moments of quietude and tension in much the same way that a single piece of music might strike different chords and invite subtle variations in tone and textural nuance. “The same piece of music can be experienced in a variety of ways and interpreted differently depending on the interests of the conductor or musicians,” says the artist. “Composition notates the same objects, experiencing them in new ways. I am always fascinated that the same few objects can, with even the slightest difference in arrangement, be completely altered in feeling and nature.”

Working through the night hours to give her greater control of the light in her studio, Mark imbues her bijou canvases with velvety depth, glinting details and a featherlike haze emerging from fiery underpainting.

“This series leans mainly into my love for the paintings of Giorgio Morandi,” says Mark, who received the top award for an emerging artist in last year’s Lester Art Prize and was shortlisted for the 2023 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and Portia Geach Memorial Award. “In these works, I take reference from [Morandi’s] tendency to arrange objects in distinct units that draw emphasis on the connections and tensions between objects and the space around them.”

For information regarding acquisitions, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Gaypalani draws her name from the tree of the same name whose yellow blossom enlivens the forests of North East Arnhemland and is a rich source of nectar for native bees. It is also used in dance and in post-funeral cleansing ceremonies as well for hardwood implements like clapsticks, spearthrowers and digging sticks.

In Yolŋu philosophy honey is a metaphor for hard won knowledge. The bees travel further and further to find the best sources to make the sweetest honey. They bring this back to the nest to share with their tribe. Gaypalani owes her inspiration to her late father whom she assisted in his celebrated artistic career. She continues to grieve for him as do his many friends worldwide. But she continues his spirit of enquiry and innovation as the first and foremost female exponent of the Found Movement.

Her intricate engravings on repurposed road signs and scrap metal are unique. They honour the songlines of her Marrakulu clan ancestral being Wuyal. These epic song poems track his odyssey from the stone quarries of Ŋilipitji in Southern Arnhem Land along the northern coastline and across to the West past Arnhem Bay. His quest for the sacred Avatar-like Waṉambi tree describes him passing through the lands of a confederacy of clans who are linked through this honeyed journey.

Working from the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, Wanambi is the leading female practitioner within the ‘found movement’, which sees roadside material gleaned on Country repurposed as shimmering, intricately detailed works of art.

For information regarding acquisitions, please contact tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au 

Our Summertime program at Michael Reid Sydney sees Hawkesbury painter Julz Beresford make her Michael Reid Sydney debut, exhibiting 11 new paintings. Beresford’s Eora/Sydney gallery exhibition sees her work reach a new level of collectability and critical attention, and follows a series of historical exhibitions at Northern Beaches, Murrurundi and Southern Highlands.

Breathe Deeply will open from 11 January 2024. Paintings from this exhibition can now be previewed at Michael Reid Sydney by appointment. Please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au to discuss viewings and acquisitions.

Yawkyawk is a small but very powerful new exhibition by senior Kuninjku artist Owen Yalandja. This is Yalandja’s second exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney this year and is the first to follow his award of the 2023 Telstra Award in the category of bark painting. This milestone achievement has positioned Yalandja as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Owen Yalandja is revered for his exquisite carving and painting skills. Central to the exhibition is the Yawkyawk spirit, which are young female spirits that live in and around waterways.

We are now welcoming expressions of interest ahead of our 2024 solo exhibition by Owen Yalandja. Those interested in acquiring the artist’s work are encouraged to contact tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au

Exploring perceptual shifts in space and time catalysed by new technologies, Richard Blackwell’s dynamic and experimental studio practice melds painting, printmaking, digital automation and analogue fabrication to form graphic compositions in three-dimensional relief. Blackwell’s works envision a future where virtual and tangible worlds are seamlessly intertwined, moving between areas of engineered precision and more nuanced, painterly gestures that impart a softer tactility. While drawing on the bold geometric forms of early modernism, the artist also echoes that era’s optimism for new, machine-age possibilities in his embrace of digital technologies, automation and the glitchy visual cues of our screen-based reality. The high-octane architectural wall works comprising ‘Time On My Hands’  bring a graphic, futurist dimension as they hang alongside a suite of framed works on paper.

For more information, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

New Arrangements is the latest series of still-life paintings by Jane Reynolds and her first to be exhibited at Michael Reid Sydney.

Striking a fine balance of playfulness and precision, Reynolds is celebrated for her artfully constructed clusters of domestic objects interspersed with angular prisms, which she renders with meticulous, hyperreal detail while drawing out the dynamism of their intersecting forms.

These graphic, shapely compositions veer towards poppy abstraction while remaining in the tangible realm of still life. A masterly approach to light and colour sees her optically charged arrangements transcend realism to conjure an illusory, almost dreamlike mood.

With New Arrangements, Reynolds introduces fruit and soft, draped elements to her compositions, bringing an organic flourish that sits in elegant counterpoise with her hard-edged constructivist forms.

For an artist who has previously shown an affinity for mid-century architecture, this new series suggests an embrace of 1980s Memphis design with its strong geometry and graphic stripes – albeit tempered by a softer, autumnal palette of auburn, salmon, peach and ecru that reveals her skill and originality as a colourist.

Following her immensely successful shows at Michael Reid Murrurundi and Sydney Contemporary 2022, New Arrangements now marks a major breakthrough for Jane Reynolds.

The exhibition opens in the upstairs space at our Eora/Sydney gallery on Friday, 6 October. Works from the series can now be viewed online and acquired by contacting danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Painting Now spotlights six painters leading the charge in reshaping and redefining art’s most storied medium, breaking it open to bold new possibilities in pursuit of visually arresting, technically dazzling, conceptually driven practice.

In identifying these artists and bringing them together in a vibrantly curated show, Michael Reid Galleries seeks to amplify the most innovative voices in the contemporary painting field, giving collectors the opportunity to discover and acquire their work at its pivotal point of entry to the upper reaches of collectibility and demand.

Spanning a diverse array of painterly approaches, modes of expression and areas of critical inquiry, Painting Now finds six established practitioners at a moment of creative breakthrough. Operating at the cutting edge of their medium, these artists bring technical mastery, formal innovation and a zest for pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.

For more information, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au