Humming with energy and rich in gestural form, Carly Le Cerf’s newest paintings will make their debut mid year at Michael Reid Sydney. This highly anticipated exhibition is the artist’s first Sydney presentation in two years, and pre-registration for acquisition is essential.

A small selection of new Carly Le Cerf paintings are available to acquire immediately. For information regarding these paintings, please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

A magnificent series of new paintings by senior Yankunytjatjara artist Betty Chimney will be on view in September at Michael Reid Sydney. A three-time AGNSW Wynne Prize finalist, Chimney is at the forefront of the innovative, exuberant, globally acclaimed new wave of First Nations painters working at Iwantja Arts.

To discuss priority access to paintings in this exhibition please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Paintings by Australia’s most senior female contemporary First Nations artist, Regina Pilawuk Wilson will grace the Sydney Gallery in 2025. A senior Ngan’gikurrungurr artist, NATSIAA winner and cultural director of Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation, Wilson is internationally celebrated, collected and is represented by important institutional collections across the world.

To discuss priority access to paintings in this exhibition please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Scott Perkins returns to Michael Reid Sydney in April 2025 with a new series of expertly crafted photographs and light boxes. Located within photography and sculpture disciplines, Perkins’s treatment of the photographic medium is precisely engineered and highly original.

Presented in three distinct modes, his images of unidentified landscapes have been captured in a state of balance, occupying a space between light and dark. Brooding, atmospheric and technically imposing, Perkins’s images are a dynamic viewing experience.

In this exhibition, viewers will be treated to impeccably presented light-box photographs of bespoke design that transform their surrounding spaces. The artist’s use of Hanhnemule metallic paper add a complementary lustre to the surface of his mysterious still photographic images.

For information, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

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

The next presentation in the upstairs gallery at Michael Reid Sydney will be our first solo exhibition from Eora/Sydney-based painter Kathy Liu, who previously dazzled audiences as one of the stars of our annual survey show Painting Now.

“My approach is highly intuitive,” says Liu, speaking with Belle magazine for a profile published in the lead-up to Painting Now. “I begin a painting without a pre-set concept, letting the colours and shapes emerge. Sometimes, it feels like I’m there to help the artworks find their own storylines.”

This open-ended process makes the canvas a conduit for fabulous adventures through imaginative worlds, inviting delightfully unexpected turns as amorphous pools begin to coalesce and playfully enigmatic, inchoate figures appear through diaphanous wafts of colour.

“It reflects my subconscious mind, bringing up narratives from my past life that I have almost forgotten,” says Liu. “Lost memories of childhood, my love of mythology, some distant lines of poetry, all of these are unburied through my work.” Like hazy memories or half-remembered dreams, the resulting works feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement.

From a smattering of stars and harlequin prints to crescent moons and cuddly creatures, figurative elements bubble up through ethereal, overlapping layers, recalling a sense of childlike innocence and unfettered imagination. But, as with the circus paintings of Chagall and Picasso – both cited by the artist as influences – there could be a tinge of melancholy or menace inside these dreamy scenes.

The ephemerality of childhood amusements is echoed by a gossamer quality that sees fragmentary images on the cusp of emerging or just fading away – an ambiguity that rhymes with Liu’s fluid approach and the serendipitous possibilities of her abstract practice.

After her celebrated showing in a stellar run of group exhibitions and her solo debut, Moon Phases, at Michael Reid Murrurundi, Liu’s upcoming presentation will be a chance for collectors to discover work from an exciting talent at a pivotal moment in her career.

For all enquiries, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au