Deme ngagurr apirri nimbi kunikuni yedityerrmusye werrme wurity wadi kanbi yawul. Wani pek ngugnuni syaw palamundi adawayiir wuyse warrgadi walipan. Awapurrpurrk ngagurr kana ngarimbirr fi me tyat deme ngangi nginin deme apirri nimbi. Awa mabud filmi yedi asa purrpurrk werrme wurity.

Our hands long ago; old people used to make painting, bark painting, fish net, clapping sticks, headbands, dillybags; we teach our younger generations what our old people taught us. Many hands we join as one community.

– Regina Pilawuk Wilson

Ever since Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s golden yellow Syaw (fishnet) won the General Painting Award at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2003, her elegantly structured paintings have quietly but unequivocally fixed her name on the contemporary art map.

Regina Pilawuk Wilson is now Australia’s most senior contemporary female Aboriginal artist, and is one at the height of her creative powers. Wilson is the matriarch of her community and is a softly spoken, major force in the Australian art world today. Her relevance and the power of her work only continue to grow; influence that is affirmed by the artist’s participation in two major art museum exhibitions in the next 12 months.

Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is honoured to work with Regina Wilson and her Community, which has for two decades produced significant and bright creative outcomes. Deme Ngayi Kinyi was Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s largest solo exhibition with Michael Reid Sydney, and is the first to exhibit on our Chippendale gallery premises.

In his 2022 exhibition Wondering About Things – his first shown at Michael Reid Sydney’s Chippendale space – Marc Etherington presented a selection of new paintings and sculptures direct from his Canadian studio. Self taught and born in Sydney’s south, Marc Etherington spent his formative years developing a strong following within the Sydney art community while fostering his emerging painting career. Etherington’s naive application and heightened imagination have been integral in propelling the artists career, who is presently recognised as one of Australia’s most unique and celebrated living artist’s.

Marc Etherington’s Michael Reid Sydney exhibition was a medley of the artist’s latest works that traversed pop culture, Canadian folklore and snippets of the artist’s personal adventures.

In April 2022 Dr Christian Thompson AO Exhibited his latest collection of artworks at Michael Reid Sydney. Encompassing performative photography and a new video work, the title of the exhibition took its name from Thompson’s new and unreleased photograph, Being Human Human Being. Boasting a softer palette of lavender and pastel yellow, Being Human Human Being joined a growing collection of Thompson’s arresting and enigmatic ‘Flower Wall’ works.

There is a familiarity that you cannot help but encounter when you glance upon a painting by Isca Greenfield-Sanders; a thinly veiled memory that diffuses each work, drawing you toward a recognised place or moment, just outside of reach. Where to locate this memory is a question that gently hovers, as you ponder how the artist has crafted these exquisite images.

It is in the hues and dominant spectrums of Kodachrome colour that our first clue to the origin of each image lightly surfaces; evidencing the profound and joyous influence that amateur photography has impressed on the artist’s life’s work. It is not a coincidence that Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ first Australian exhibition is showing at a contemporary photographic gallery. In fact, her entire painting practice is wedded to the light based medium.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders commences each new exhibition by consulting her archive of collected negatives and slides, mostly dated from the 1950’s and 60’s. Acquired from markets and auction lots, these once-forgotten relics are photographic accounts of middle-class America, captured by unknown photographers who occasionally struggled to operate their cameras. While firmly concerned with the nostalgic agency attached to analogue photography, Greenfield-Sanders’ work is directed solely through a painterly lens.

The aesthetics of amateur photography has, over decades, informed and underpinned the visuals of Greenfield-Sanders’ painting work, which occurs in cross-disciplinary stages in the artists New York studio. Beginning with a digital collage framework of multiple found photographs, images are delicately rendered in watercolour and colour pencil. This process sees a once distant and anonymous photographic moment receive a contemporary revival, brought into current discussion through dozens of hours of highly skilled painting work.

The artist’s large scale oil paintings on canvas (held in distinguished public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Brooklyn Museum, NY, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK) are directly informed by their parent watercolour studies, and are the final stage in a series of protracted studio processes. The binding element that threads this three-stage process- found, domestic photography- is by this stage diffused by a filter of three artistic mediums, drawing wonderful parallels to the rogue memories petitioned by these striking works of art.

Ocean Eyes of Blue was Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ first Australian exhibition. The artist lives and works in New York.

In 2022, for the first time in her career, Petrina Hicks invited audiences ‘into the studio’ by presenting a delicate installation of test print polaroids at Michael Reid Sydney. Mapping the artist’s entire career and containing hundreds of never before seen images, Polaroids was a documentary exhibition that put light to the working processes of one of Australia’s most talented photographic artists.

Polaroids was accompanied by the public release of two unseen editions by Petrina Hicks, Lauren and Monk and Five Dragons.

To commence 2022, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin embarked on an ambitious collaboration with Narelle Autio and Trent Parke in hosting an iteration of The Summation of Force, a film produced by the artist duo that has never shown in Sydney.

Premiering on Thursday December 9th and showing throughout the summer, The Summation of Force exhibited at Michael Reid Sydney and was collectors’ first opportunity to acquire still images from this very important work of art. On view were large format stills, a portfolio of photographs from The Summation of Force, and an installation of original ephemera used in the production of the film.

Summation of Force is an astounding moving image installation initially launched at the Samstag Museum of Art to widespread acclaim in 2017. Regarded as masterpiece collaboration, the poetic and haunting video installation is breathtaking example of the cinematic vision that informs the photographic practice of both Narelle Autio and Trent Parke.