Michael Reid Sydney will commence our 2026 exhibitions program with the most ambitious project to date from Eora/Sydney-based contemporary painter Kathy Liu. Now available to preview digitally and in person by request, Liu’s new series takes the title Odyssey both as a nod to the Classical Greco-Roman inflections of the curious, inchoate forms that play out within her abstract compositions – figures that slowly cohere through gossamer clouds of colour, lending her large-scale paintings the feeling of a faded fresco or timeworn tapestry – and to the open-ended process that produced them. For Liu, this approach is another odyssey of sorts, embracing the serendipitous digressions and chance encounters that emerge through her painterly wanderings.

“None were preplanned,” says the artist, whose forthcoming solo exhibition will be her first to unfold across our entire flagship ground-floor space. “Instead of letting the idea lead to action, I reversed this, beginning with action, letting myself embark on a personal odyssey, a wander towards the notion of an idea. It’s almost like a jack-in-the-box, full of surprises, and I enjoy surprising myself.” Awash with an almost celestial luminosity, Odyssey represents a confident and sophisticated honing of Liu’s singular vision and technique, even while her methods remain open to the unexpected, ethereal and ineffable possibilities of an intuitive abstract practice – a process likened to “a game of chance” in a 2024 Belle magazine profile.

“What might begin as an exercise in loose, tonal abstraction can take a delightfully unexpected turn as amorphous pools begin to coalesce and playfully enigmatic, inchoate figures emerge through diaphanous wafts of colour,” noted the Belle story. “Redolent of hazy memories, nocturnal musings or half-remembered dreams, the resulting compositions feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement.”

Discussing her Odyssey series, Liu says she imagines her paintings as a visual analogue to stream-of-consciousness writing – bringing another literary dimension to a series that feels imbued, albeit with delightful ambiguities, with gestures to classical tales, epic narratives and oral histories held in the mind’s eye. “Just as our thought processes are very rarely linear and defined, my works, an introspective reflection of the subconscious mind, don’t present clearly bound storylines,” says the artist. “Instead, I would like to invite my audience to wander through the paintings, to explore the potential narratives within them.”

To sign up for early previews and first access to works from Odyssey by Kathy Liu – or book a private viewing before the 2025 Christmas holidays – please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

A major highlight of the official artistic program at the 2026 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival, Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti opens in February at Michael Reid Sydney and marks the Tiwi Islands artist and dancer’s first large-scale solo exhibition since his star turn in our annual survey Painting Now.

Set to walk alongside the Sistagirls in the 2026 Mardi Gras Parade, Tipungwuti is a significant presence within the Tiwi Islands community and an artist whose highly distinctive painting practice continues to draw strong institutional and collector interest across Australia and abroad.

Tipungwuti’s Murrakupupuni (Country) is Wurankuwu, a homeland inherited through his father’s family, while his tribe, Wulinjuwula (Mosquito), comes from his matrilineal line. Having performed ballet in Eora/Sydney in the 1980s, he is also an accomplished dancer. “My father danced Jarranga (buffalo) and my mother danced Ampiji (rainbow),” says Tipungwuti, who continues to perform at ceremony and events where there is yoyi (dance). “My totem is buffalo, but when some of those women who are related through my mother’s side dance Ampiji, I join in, too.”

Across his striking monochrome works on bark and canvas, Tipungwuti depicts the celestial figures at the heart of Tiwi ceremonial culture: Japarra, the moon-man who brought mortality into the world, and japalinga, the stars whose ochred forms adorn dancers during ceremony and yoyi. “I paint Japarra because I want to tell that story from long ago – what he did on earth and keep that story going,” says the artist. The story recounts Japarra’s encounter with Purukuparli and Wai-ai, the death of their child, and his ascent to the sky, where his white light reminds the Tiwi people of the cycle of life and death.

“In parlingarri – old time – Japarra saw the family out bush; the baby died from the sun, and Japarra wanted to take him up for three days and bring him back alive. But the father said, ‘Karlu’ – ‘no’. After fighting, Japarra flew up and stayed in the sky to become the moon and look down on the whole world. Now everyone around the world can’t come back; they must follow that father and his son and die when it is their time.”

Rendered in stark black and white, the ancestral moon-man appears, by turns, solemn, playful and elemental; his face endlessly compelling. “Japarra is white – the moon-man has a white body. All the stars are white and the moon is white too,” Tipungwuti explains of his palette, made from white ochre collected on Country at Wurankuwu. “I want to share my story and the story of my painting with people from all over the world.”

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Tipungwuti’s work was shown to great acclaim in 2025 at UNSW Galleries in Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New, curated by José Da Silva with Jilamara Arts.

“In years gone by, there was a strong Tiwi tradition of producing nude figurative ironwood carvings that tell [Japarra’s] story,” writes cultural critic and researcher Tristen Harwood. “Tipungwuti’s paintings draw on these important cultural influences to create innovative works grounded in his knowledge of the old stories and connection to longstanding practices of storytelling.”

Works from Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti will be available to preview and acquire in the lead-up to the show’s opening in February as part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival. For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Having trained in the classical tenets of still-life oil painting, Mulubinba/Newcastle-based painter Heath Nock now takes an iconoclast’s approach to the genre, expanding its field of vision to encompass found images from the cultural past and treating this eclectic source material as objects to be observed, dissected and remade with a still-life painter’s eye.

Nock applies the techniques of the Dutch masters to fragments of vintage advertising, old photographs and print ephemera – giving painterly weight to images once fleetingly consumed. “Using photos and advertising, cropping to create a new story with a sense of ambiguity,” he explains, “I want the viewer to question the work and be lost in the moment.”

Across his Painting Now series, these reframed relics become the “stuff of life” – playful, nostalgic and laced with irreverence. Nock’s intriguingly cropped, close-up compositions flirt with the language of mid-century magazines and 1970s leisure culture: suntanned bodies hog the frame, childhood snapshots are steeped in a halcyon glow, cigarette models offer a wink of louche, macho laconicism from a time when vice was aspirational. In the artist’s hands, this imagery is both homage and subtle critique – a witty meditation on how masculinity, desire and memory are staged and sold.

Following a landmark year that included a residency in Germany’s prestigious Young Artist Residency Weidingen and an acclaimed exhibition at UTS Gallery, Nock’s first showing with Michael Reid Sydney displays a thrilling expansion of his painterly vocabulary. What begins as an act of appropriation arrives as something more intimate and evocative – a portrait not of the figures he paints, but of the images themselves, newly luminous, transportive and alive.

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

Yirrkala-based artist Dhukumul Waṉambi brings ancestral songlines into motion with Marrakulu Monuk – an animated digital painting that translates her clan’s sacred saltwater miny’tji into luminous, swirling form. “Instead of painting Marrakulu Monuk onto bark with ochres, I wanted to make it digital while staying true to our traditions,” says the artist, who works as a filmmaker and digital artist with The Mulka Project.

Using a self-made digital brush that mimics the fine marwat of Yolŋu bark painting, Waṉambi animates the infinite movement of her Marrakulu homeland’s waters at Gurka’wuy. “My father inspired me to make paintings like this,” she notes of the late artist and cultural leader Mr Waṉambi. “He was the first to take miny’tji that are normally painted onto bark and burial poles, and make them move.”

By transposing cultural knowledge and a time-honoured visual language into the digital realm, Waṉambi continues her father’s legacy of artistic innovation – a mantle shared by her sister, award-winning contemporary artist Gaypalani Waṉambi – and embodies the experimental spirit of Painting Now.

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

Columbiere Tipungwuti paints the celestial figures of Tiwi ceremonial culture – Japarra, the moon-man who brought mortality to the world, and japalinga, the stars whose ochred forms adorn dancers’ bodies in ceremony and yoyi. “I paint Japarra because I want to tell that story from long ago – what he did on earth and keep that story going,” says the artist. The story tells of Japarra’s fateful encounter with Purukuparli and Wai-ai, which led to the death of their child and Japarra’s ascent to the sky, where his white light reminds the Tiwi people of the cycles of life and death.

“In parlingarri – old time – Japarra saw the family out bush; the baby died from the sun, and Japarra wanted to take him up for three days and bring him back alive. But the father said, ‘Karlu’ – ‘no’. After fighting, Japarra flew up and stayed in the sky to become the moon and look down on the whole world. Now everyone around the world can’t come back; they must follow that father and his son and die when it is their time.”

On bark and canvas, Tipungwuti renders the ancestral moon-man in stark black and white, his face striking, solemn and compelling. “Japarra is white – the moon-man has a white body. All the stars are white and the moon is white too,” he explains of his elemental palette, made from white ochre gathered on Country at Wurankuwu.

“I want to share my story and the story of my painting with people from all over the world,” says Tipungwuti, who also has a background in dance – performing ballet in Sydney in the 1980s and yoyi on the Tiwi Islands.

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Tipungwuti showed his paintings to great acclaim this year at UNSW Galleries in Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New, a widely celebrated exhibition curated by José Da Silva with Jilamara Arts. In Painting Now, Tipungwuti continues this lineage, transforming Tiwi creation stories into powerful, luminous images that bridge earth, sky and spirit.

“In years gone by, there was a strong Tiwi tradition of producing nude figurative ironwood carvings that tell [Japarra’s] story,” writes cultural critic and researcher Tristen Harwood. “Tipungwuti’s paintings draw on these important cultural influences to create innovative works grounded in his knowledge of the old stories and connection to longstanding practices of storytelling.”

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

In the painted worlds of Nipaluna/Hobart-based artist Jo Chew, built forms become vessels for an open-ended meditation on vulnerability, hopefulness, loss and longing. “A poem doesn’t need to describe everything and a song doesn’t need to make sense – I feel it can be the same with a painting,” says the artist, whose vibrant, sun-dappled paintings derive from collaged compositions; fragmentary photographs, drawings and found references spliced together “in the hope of finding something that speaks to me.”

This process achieves an almost trompe-l’œil effect, with her large-scale paintings retaining a collagistic sense of pictorial layering in space – an illusory interweaving of paper and paint, memory and material. In doing so, her practice breathes new life into the medium, in step with the curatorial ambitions of Painting Now.

Despite the work’s compelling ambiguities, themes slowly coalesce through Chew’s Painting Now series, in which house-like structures repeat in various guises and take on poetic resonance. Whether temporary and improvisational – tents and makeshift A-frames – or suggesting past visions of a future utopia – modernist dream houses and geodesic domes – her recurring pitched forms invoke a universal language of shelter, inviting reflections on our longing for refuge and a place to call home.

Brought to life during her final months in her long-term home, Chew’s exploration of how we dwell and what we treasure is tinged with a quiet acceptance of transience. “It doesn’t mean things or places can’t be treasured,” she says. “Just that nothing is really ours to keep.” The artist notes a nostalgic thread running through her constructed images: “A desire to get something back that we can’t quite retrieve,” she says. “But they’re not dark or depressing; I think there’s an appreciation for something from the past and an optimism that something similar might still be found. Many of my works this year have a feeling of something hidden and forming, suggesting a period of rest and reflection; cocoon-like, perhaps.”

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

South Australian contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler joins Painting Now 2025 with his most ambitious body of work to date. A two-time National Emerging Art Prize finalist who recently joined the stable of artists represented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Southern Highlands after a succession of sold-out solo shows at both spaces, Drechsler has taken Painting Now as an opportunity to significantly dial up his work’s scale and scope while honing the distinctive visual language for which he is already widely celebrated. On his largest canvases yet, Drechsler’s work attains a newly cinematic heft, deepening the ongoing dialogue between visibility and concealment – belonging and displacement – that emerges from his queer subjectivity and animates his visually dazzling, conceptually rich practice.

Within these expansive and arresting compositions, recurring motifs appear in deliberately “foreign” spaces: vintage cars, building facades and flashes of the artist’s trademark green-and-white stripe. “The stripes stand in for my physical self,” he says. “They take up space and attract attention – things that don’t come naturally to me.” That double movement – to stand out and blend in at once – threads through the series with quiet persistence.

A curatorial prompt to consider the visual language of auteurs such as Wes Anderson became a springboard for a bolder palette and dramatic sensibilities befitting the work’s broader scale. Here, punchy pinks and cardamom reds meet tender tonal harmonies, while precise drawing loosens into gestural passages; “mistakes” remain visible as signs of the artist’s hand. “Dean encouraged me to look at cinematic devices and framing,” says Drechsler. “It opened me up to composition in new ways – to big reds, saturated pinks and how colour can create mood.”

Drechsler describes these adventures in colour as both exciting and somewhat nerve-racking. “Are they too much?” he wonders. “Maybe. But that tension is part of what it means to make art as an emerging queer artist. The overarching message is that we all fit, wherever we are, and that we are valued and belong in any room we occupy. Painting taught me that.”

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.

Spanning the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, this private art collection from Perth, Western Australia, has been steadily assembled over the past twenty years.

The purpose of this collection has been to delight and intrigue its owner. How each artist delved into their subject has been of central importance to their acquisition. The use of the entire surface, the subject, the play of negative space, and the artist’s unique technique were all carefully considered and contrasted prior to acquisition. Chosen for their strength as art museum–quality examples, the works were selected for their artistic merit rather than the prominence of their makers’ signatures. Each artwork has been appraised as a fine example of its period. Every piece has been collected with an eye for the object itself—not, as can often be the case, in the spirit of the trophy collector who pursues a signature above all else.

After decades of collecting with vigour and curiosity, the collector–now in a downsizing phase–has decided to release a portion of the collection to the market. This presents a rare opportunity to acquire fresh and compelling artworks that would sit comfortably within any art museum or private collection.

Please consider.

– Michael Reid OAM

For enquiries, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au