A major survey of new work by artists at the forefront of Australian painting will form a central thread within Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s 10th anniversary Sydney Contemporary presentation, with our largest contingent of contemporary painters to date revealing and reaffirming the medium’s enduring vitality, conceptual breadth and material possibilities through seven distinct perspectives.
Established as one of the most important and original voices in Australian contemporary art for close to four decades, Tim Maguire will exhibit at Sydney Contemporary for the first time since the announcement of his representation by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin. Across an internationally celebrated career, Maguire has continually tested the boundaries between painting, printmaking and digital image-making, producing works of extraordinary impact, intensity and technical mastery. Rich in colour, luminosity and astonishing, ever-unfolding detail, the sprawling and cinematic paintings bound for the fair represent the culmination of a roving creative life marked by rigorous experimentation and a restless, decades-long wrangling with the image-making process, its perceptual alchemies and the painterly tensions between surface and depth, abstraction and illusion. Maguire’s work pulls the viewer into a heightened field of looking – an effulgence of colour that may dissipate at close range into pure sensation or optically charged, glitchy abstraction, only to cohere from afar into impossible landscapes and hyper-floral tableaux.
One of the most exciting and original voices in Australian art today, Sid Pattni returns to Sydney Contemporary following a succession of projects that have continually broadened the conceptual scope of his painting practice, wrestling with the afterlife of empire, its complex aesthetic inheritances and the intricacies of diasporic identity from his perspective as an Indian-Australian artist. Sydney Contemporary will be the artist’s first Australian presentation since completing the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts Residency in Paris, which was awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales – where he previously exhibited as a finalist in the 2025 Archibald Prize – and culminated in his solo exhibition Curiosities at Michael Reid Berlin. Pattni’s latest work extends an entirely original painterly language whose visual sumptuousness and complex hybridity derive as much from historical research as from the questions he has long carried about belonging and self-understanding.
Sydney Contemporary will mark the first showing with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin for newly represented artist Stephanie Tabram. One of Tasmania’s most accomplished and widely collected artists, Tabram has spent more than three decades honing a singular approach that reconciles the traditions of realism with a deeply felt, experiential understanding of place. Working from her studio on the Derwent River, the artist captures pastoral landscapes known through daily immersion and close observation. At once expansive and intricately detailed, her compositions unfold as complex visual fields in which light, atmosphere and texture are held in dynamic equilibrium: sunlit foliage, silvery waterways and the brooding, gothic drama of Tasmanian skies are built gradually through ultrafine strokes into images that feel less like static views than living theatres.
Together with Tabram, Julz Beresford and Carly Le Cerf round out a formidable trio of artists who have each, in their distinct and singular ways, made the Australian landscape their painterly preoccupation, forging connections to place through sustained and repeated immersion in environments of profound personal significance. For Beresford, these are the romantic, brooding waterways and bushland surrounds of the Hawkesbury River and the majestic Snowy Monaro ranges – two subjects indelibly etched in her creative psyche and set to loom large in her Sydney Contemporary series. After long stretches in the field, Beresford channels her elemental encounters with an immediacy and expressive energy that preserves the feeling of being there, sculpting and carving successive layers of thickly applied paint into sweeping nature scenes.
Where Beresford gravitates towards the lushly verdant worlds of the southeast, Le Cerf turns her gaze inland to the sunburnt country and epic ranges of the Australian interior. Humming with a sense of the artist’s affinity for these environments, her paintings harness dynamic gestural forms, rich textural details and vivid earth tones to convey both their vast, heroic sweep and granular, gritty detail. Together, Beresford and Le Cerf bring new vitality to the grand tradition of Australian landscape painting, embracing the inherent monumentality and elemental heft of their subjects while approaching them through close observation, a deft approach to materiality and an attentiveness to the minute, emotionally experienced particularities of place.
John Honeywill’s presence at Sydney Contemporary coincides with his latest solo exhibition, Lean Towards, at Michael Reid Sydney – a short walk from the fair’s Carriageworks location. Brought to life with meticulous precision and masterly control of light and mood, Honeywill’s paintings cast everyday objects as quietly dazzling subjects seemingly lit from within. The artist’s practice is propelled by a curious, almost ineffable affinity for the objects of his gaze – from sugary sweets to elegant vessels enclosing fruit or delicately unfolding flowers – subjects that exude stillness and subtle alchemy as they coalesce in graceful conversations while suspended against ambiguous, luminescent planes. As part of this year’s Sydney Contemporary offsite program, the artist will join us at the gallery for a private exhibition tour and conversation.
Rounding out this magnificent seven, Kathy Liu returns to Sydney Contemporary after a banner 18 months, during which she presented her most ambitious project to date – her large-scale solo exhibition Odyssey – and was recognised with shortlistings in the 2025 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and this year’s Waverley Art Prize. An ascendant force in Australian abstraction, Liu has garnered acclaim for an intuitive approach in which amorphous, diaphanous layers of colour and finely worked surfaces slowly give way to enigmatic, inchoate figures and impossible architectures. With the feeling of a faded fresco or timeworn tapestry and awash with an almost celestial luminosity, her paintings unfold as imaginative worlds discovered as much as devised. Her Sydney Contemporary series reveals a singular vision brought confidently into focus, even as her methods remain open to the unexpected possibilities of a process likened to “a game of chance” in a 2024 Belle magazine profile.
For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
