Seeking a Silk Purse

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present Seeking a Silk Purse, the latest solo exhibition from leading contemporary painter Andrea Huelin. One of the bright stars in our stable of represented artists and the winner of the 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize, Huelin seeks to capture the elusive qualities of light and lustre with an economy of loose and exuberant gestures.

Seeking a Silk Purse is a dazzling painterly ode to the pleasures of a collecting life and the thrill of trawling for treasures in op shops, antiques emporiums and Aladdin’s caves. Widely celebrated for her vibrant, evocative and gently expressive still-life paintings, Huelin has now completed some of her largest works to date, conjuring interiors and tablescapes that heave with wonderfully eclectic objects and coloured-glass vessels that glisten like jewels right to the edge of her newly expanded canvas.

Huelin deftly imbues each of her scenes with character and emotion, breathing life into the inanimate objects she depicts. This vitality is richly evident even in the absence of the human subjects that lend such immense appeal to her portraits – including her ebullient tribute to the beloved comedian Cal Wilson, which garnered one of Australia’s most keenly contested creative accolades.

Last year, Huelin relocated her practice from the tropical climes of sunny Far North Queensland to an ex-industrial space amid the grittier, bohemian hubbub of Naarm/Melbourne’s inner west. For an artist so deeply attuned to the nuances of light – and whose subject matter is gleaned from local op shops and often nested with bits of biographical detail – this change of scenery can be immediately felt in her work’s mood and sensibilities.

In Seeking a Silk Purse, the light feels moodier, the tones richer, the atmosphere more cloistered and decidedly Melburnian than before. A spectacular and sumptuous rebuke to the anaemic minimalism of an excessively decluttered post-Kondo world, these works celebrate the emotional pull and totemic, transportive power of vintage objects amassed in a spirit of eclecticism and abundance.

Delighting in the happy accidents of the collecting impulse run gloriously amok, Huelin’s more-is-more jumble of tchotchkes and curios, tableware and trinkets, lava lamps and kitchen accoutrements, has been brought to life with a vibrancy and exuberance befitting the maximalist MO of the spaces she paints and the air of history, theatricality and character they contain.

The artist’s paean to the pursuit of collecting – of being surrounded by objects through which we might access past lives – remains grounded in her sensitivity to light in the here-and-now and her close observations of its delicate, fleeting effects. With her graceful gestures and masterly application of colour, Huelin bottles an ephemeral interplay of shadows, refractions, translucency and luminosity that enriches her joyous windows into teeming treasure troves.

Works from Seeking a Silk Purse by Andrea Huelin have arrived at Michael Reid Sydney and can be viewed and acquired by request. To request a preview, secure an acquisition, book an in-person viewing or RSVP for the opening event, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au