A view with a view

Award-winning Dharawal/Wollongong-based contemporary painter India Mark will return to Michael Reid Sydney in June with her second solo exhibition in our upstairs space since joining the gallery as a represented artist. Mark’s forthcoming body of work will soon be available to preview by request and is her first large-scale release since her solo debut, Night Music. Since then, Mark has garnered ever-wider acclaim with a succession of projects, including her star turn in the Ngununggula show Tender, which continues until 15 June.

“India Mark’s exquisitely composed, richly detailed and intimately scaled still-life paintings balance elegant restraint with a quiet intensity expressed via fiery underpainting,” noted a Belle magazine story published alongside the opening of Tender. “Ngununggula’s gathering of six leading Australian women artists explores the soft power of the title’s emotional register; its notions of care and significance beyond a gendered lens.”

In 2023, Mark was awarded the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize for Studio Self-portrait, a work noted by the program’s judges for its “intimate scale, delicate brushwork and direct gaze of the subject.” Mark has also been a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and Portia Geach Memorial Award, and received the highest honour for an emerging artist in the Lester Art Prize.

“I feel like my finished paintings are very calm and contained, which is surprising because the process of painting isn’t always calm,” says Mark. “More often than not, it’s frantic and full of adrenaline as I’m constantly trying to make sense of what’s in front of me.”