Our annual group show spotlights an exciting school of established artists whose practice expands the creative possibilities of art’s most storied medium and pushes it into optically charged, technically dazzling and conceptually daring terrain.

The success of so many Painting Now alumni reflects the program’s aim to identify established talents at a moment of creative breakthrough and present their work just as it ascends to a new level of collectability and acclaim.

For enquiries, please email curator and Michael Reid Beyond program manager Dean Phillips-Andersen dean@michaelreid.com.au

In November, Michael Reid Sydney will welcome a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Eora/Sydney-based artist Louise Frith, who debuts in our upstairs exhibition space after a stellar run of solo exhibitions at our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands galleries.

Building on the creative breakthrough of her widely celebrated Murrurundi shows Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries – as well as her recent collaboration with fashion brand Nancybird, which saw her elegant flannel flowers and other painted botanicals transposed onto textiles – Frith’s forthcoming project will take us deeper into the thickets of the bushland covering Sydney’s North Head.

Moving with painterly gusto between areas of intricate, tightly controlled detail and an overall mood of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and tangle right to the edge of each canvas.

Sketching out in the field before returning to her painting studio, Frith observes and translates North Head’s dense floral interplay, seasonal shifts, and the filtered patterns of light and shade cast across the forest floor.

The resulting paintings often read less as conventional landscapes than as exuberant, impressionistic fields of pattern-like flora that envelop and transport the viewer. Each work is at once precisely rendered, yet verging on abstraction, with overlapping forms and immersive, optically charged, tapestry-like effects.

To discuss works by Louise Frith, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

The Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury and the Snowy Monaro regions of New South Wales are indelibly etched in Julz Beresford‘s creative psyche and continue to propel her practice. Born in rural New South Wales, the artist reflects that being outdoors has always been at the heart of her existence.

An essential part of Beresford’s process is being present in the landscape, observing natural phenomena that then inform her paintings. Working en plein air, the artist collects gouache studies and drawings that later become the departure point of her studio-made paintings.

Beresford’s intent is for the audience to feel engaged with the energy of the landscapes she paints. Her works are both an impression of landscapes and an embodiment of how it actually feels to be there. Her paintings have a sense of intense energy. Painting alla prima with a vigorous and spirited application, the artist challenges herself to remain in the moment and ‘solve’ the painting as she goes.

Beresford joined the Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin stable of represented artists in 2024 after a successful exhibition career over many years at our Northern Beaches gallery.

To sign up for first access to works from her forthcoming series, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

This September, Michael Reid Sydney will present our second solo exhibition from Mulubinba/Newcastle-based interdisciplinary artist Michelle Gearin since she joined our stable of represented artists in early 2023. Returning to the gallery for the first time in more than two years, Gearin will present a sequence of large-scale paintings that mark an exciting new chapter in her evolving practice.

Gearin’s work invites the viewer to move beyond the material world into a lucid, otherworldly dimension. Her distinctive visual language draws from a deeply personal lexicon of references: from Shunga and Sanskrit Kama Sutra miniatures to 19th-century Symbolism. These influences converge with autobiography – fragments of memory, desire and transformation – resulting in paintings that are both intimate and elemental, charged with a kind of noirish eroticism, shapeshifting magic and mythic ambiguity.

Since her widely acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition Lux Aeterna, Gearin has exhibited extensively in institutional group shows, including Old Stories, New Magic at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, where her spellbinding, wall-sized installation was anchored by her most ambitious work to date: Metamorphosis. Her work has since been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat for its permanent collection, underscoring the growing momentum surrounding her practice and its growing resonance with both private collectors and public institutions.

Before joining Michael Reid, Gearin’s work was featured in several notable exhibitions, including Female Drivers (Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 2022), where her multi-panel work Prism – comprising 49 circular paintings – was acquired by the gallery. That same year, she exhibited alongside Alex Seton at The Lock-Up in Newcastle, presenting the multimedia installation Double Rainbow, which explored the science of optics and the perceptual mystery of the human eye.

To request a preview and gain priority access to works from Michelle Gearin’s forthcoming solo exhibition, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au.

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present our first exhibition from Naarm/Melbourne-based Indian-Australian artist Sid Pattni, who joined our stable of represented artists earlier this year and is currently a finalist in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Titled The Act of Putting It Back Together, Pattni’s solo exhibition debut will be celebrated with an opening event on Thursday, 31 July, 6–8pm.

Pattni first captured the attention of our chairman and director, Michael Reid OAM, when his work was shortlisted for the National Emerging Art Prize in 2024. “His paintings made me go wow,” says Michael. “But what elevated Pattni for me was his compelling exploration of Indian-Anglo colonisation and immigration to Australia – then and now.”

Born in London and raised in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth, Pattni says he first approached painting as a way to process the dissonance he felt navigating multiple cultural identities.​​​​ “I’m interested in how aesthetics shaped under empire can be reclaimed and reconfigured to tell new stories about migration, memory, and identity,” says the artist, whose work borrows and remixes elements from Mughal miniature paintings, Indian textiles, British botanical drawings and 19th-century Company Paintings.

“I return to themes of hybridity, belonging and erasure, referencing historical visual formats not as homage, but as a means of critique and reimagining.” Speaking with Belle magazine for a recent profile, the artist describes his latest series as a continuation of his engagement with colonial visual traditions.

“The floral borders, inspired by British botanical illustrations, are no longer literal – they’re invented, composite, almost dreamlike. They symbolise how cultural artefacts were appropriated and recontextualised during empire, and how these reinterpretations continue to influence diasporic self-perception. What feels new in this body of work is a deeper emotional intensity.” The Act of Putting It Back Together is a response to inherited ways of seeing and an invitation to look again – “more critically,” says Pattni.

For information and acquisition opportunities please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au