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

Megan Hales is an Eora/Sydney-based artist who has refined her extraordinary skills over ten years as a painter, muralist and fabricator. Exploring the ever tightening nexus between natural and human environments, Megan’s paintings are inspired by everyday chaos, presenting moments where nature intrudes on familiar urban scenarios. With an incredibly detailed hyper-realist approach – infused with hints of the carnivalesque and nods to Australian New Wave films – her cinematic paintings are thrilling to experience. The artist has exhibited in group shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and was a finalist in The Darling Prize, The Blake Prize and Montalto Sculpture Prize. Most recently she was selected for the Art Incubator program, which will culminate with a major exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney.

For more information about works of art by Megan Hales, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Forage is Andrea Huelin‘s newest Michael Reid Sydney exhibition and is the first to follow the artist’s 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize win earlier this year. In May, Andrea Huelin made national news when her delightful portrait of Cal Wilson was awarded the prize, thrusting her work into nationwide collecting conversations.

Forage is Huelin’s first exhibition since the prize win, and is described by the artist as being a love letter to her home of 28 years, borrowing from the gladdening sights of tropical North Queensland domesticity. For the first time, Huelin incorporates patterned backdrops in her paintings, illustrating vintage wallpaper designs that were prominent throughout her childhood. This delightful creative departure introduces a refreshing dimension to Andrea Huelin’s oeuvre, and once again demonstrates her superior understanding of form, narrative, colour and light.

Those interested in discussing an acquisition are encouraged to be in touch by emailing danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au. A selection of paintings from Forage have also recently exhibited at Sydney Contemporary 2023, which took place at Carriageworks in early September.

On Thursday, 21 September, Michael Reid Sydney will host an evening reception at the Gallery to celebrate Huelin’s exhibition. For more information about attending our event, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Mai Nguyễn-Long is an artist, academic and storyteller whose mixed heritage informs the tapestry of narratives that live through her work. Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father and Australian mother, Nguyễn-Long’s formative years were spent living in Papua New Guinea as well as the Philippines. As an adult, Mai Nguyễn-Long has lived in Australia and China, however, it was her pilgrimage to Vietnam that has had the most profound influence on the aesthetic and theoretical direction of her art.

Since the early 2000’s, Nguyễn-Long’s practice has seen many iterations, consistent in narrative but materially diverse. Her work endeavours to crystallise her own identity, interrogating her migrations and acknowledging what was left behind. In 2017 Nguyễn-Long made her first Vomit Girl from clay, a moment that would direct the next six years of her art and education.

The story of Vomit Girl is one of family history and belonging, and is the subject of her PhD, recently acquired from the University of Wollongong. Vomit Girl is a symbol of what has been erased and speaks broadly to diasporic trauma following the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Through her Vomit Girl installations, Mai Nguyễn-Long collides cultural artefacts and personal histories, borrowing from Vietnamese rural aesthetics known as mộc mạc. Mai Nguyễn-Long’s armies of Vomit Girl sculptures have make-believe conversations and are artistic devices that attempt to mend what feels irreparably broken.

In recent years Mai Nguyễn-Long’s articulation through clay has seen her profile consistently rise within Australian art circles. In 2022 her work exhibited at the 12th Berlin Biennale, and she now joins Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin as a represented artist. Vomit Girl Stories is Nguyen-Long’s first exhibition with the Gallery, and will show in Sydney from August 3 – September 2, 2023.

The success of Mai Nguyễn-Long’s practice is firmly attributed to her universal vision, which reconciles personal loss whilst supplying her audience with agency to ponder what may be missing for themselves.

Works in this exhibition are now available to acquire. To begin a conversation please be in touch with danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Australian photographer Tamara Dean presents her newest exhibition of photographs, The Suspended Moment at Michael Reid Sydney, which furthers her employment of a purpose-built underwater studio. In this remarkably magic new series, Dean creates sumptuous still life compositions that contradict their genre, presenting animated scenes that appear to defy gravity.

Pulling from the rich symbolism found in 17^th century Dutch Still life painting, Tamara Dean creates vignettes of distinct palettes, through which her carefully selected objects appear to perform. Aside from one delicately placed hand in Love and Desire, Dean allows her objects to narrate our story. By removing the figures that typically populate her photographs, Tamara Dean raises existential questions in beautifully tense ways.

The symbolism found in The Suspended Moment alludes to debates concerning the climate emergency as well as the omnipresent threat of increasing natural disasters. The gentle buoyancy of Tamara Dean’s fruit, fabrics, and flowers, imitate an increasing loss of control. The Suspended Moment brings a touch of poetry to an alarming environmental debate, and is one that is expertly directed by Dean.

For assistance with an acquisition from this exhibition, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Canadian painter Gavin Lynch makes his Australian exhibition debut at Michael Reid Sydney in presenting a panoramic installation of eight individual landscape paintings. Arborarium is now showing in our second floor gallery, and is a wonderful opportunity for Australian collectors to access the artist’s work locally.

Gavin Lynch is an artist in full control of his creative vision, whose gentle disruption of the landscape genre observes the role of painting in a digitally saturated world. Lynch’s articulation of North American landscapes is refreshingly original, and is a visual language achieved through a series of protracted studio methods. In each artwork, Lynch upheaves the landscapes that he paints, reassembles them, and reduces his compositions to planes of pattern and colour. Lynch approaches his paintings with a tessellated vision, drawing wonderful parallels to the digitally informed processes that inspire them.

Photography, field-trip sketches, and collage inform the artist’s final paintings, most of which depict his home province of Wakefield, Quebec. In the studio, brush, washes, masking and airbrush techniques are used, skilfully combined by Lynch to emulate the appearance of recognisable ‘real worlds’.

Gavin Lynch holds a BFA from Emily Carr University (2009) and a MFA from the University of Ottawa (2012). He is the recipient of awards and grants from various organisations, including the Canada Council for the Arts (2014), the Ontario Arts Council (2013) and the province of Ontario (2011).

In 2014 Lynch was a finalist in the RBC Painting Competition, which was exhibited at the Musée des Beaux Arts.  His work has been exhibited across Canada, featured in Canadian Art magazine and is in various permanent collections, including Air Canada, Simon Fraser University, TD Canada Trust and the City of Ottawa Permanent Collection.

Those interested in exploring more are invited to contact: danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au