The Aotearoa Art Fair will mark the first public showing for the latest project from acclaimed Australian contemporary photographer Tamara Dean, one of the defining image-makers, visual storytellers and photographic innovators of her generation. Dean is set to debut two new works from her forthcoming series, The Garden, in which lithe, colourfully clad subjects are gracefully transformed into hybrid flower-human figures. The Garden has already garnered significant acclaim, with select photographs shortlisted for the 2026 Blake Prize and the 10th-anniversary edition of the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. Following the news of these dual awards shortlistings, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is pleased to host the inaugural outing for this already lauded project and invites collectors to register for priority access.

Working between her custom-built underwater photo studio and the wild floral abundance of the natural world, Dean describes The Garden as a series created through two distinct formats and approaches, connected through colour, flora and an ongoing exploration of our place within natural ecosystems. “Flowers, plants and fabrics are carefully selected and composed to create visual relationships between images,” says the artist, whose Blake and Ravenswood Prize nods add to an extraordinary run of recent accolades, including her triumphs at the 2025 Hornsby Art Prize and Naked & Nude Art Prize. “Materials used in the underwater works echo the colours of the flowers found in the garden photographs, allowing the two approaches to remain aesthetically and conceptually connected despite their different environments.”

For acquisition enquiries, please contact tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au

This year’s Aotearoa Art Fair will see the debut of a luminous new work by globally lauded Australian photographer Petrina Hicks. Over more than two decades, Hicks has honed her singular style and cemented her place at the forefront of her field. The subject of several institutional surveys – including her 2018 NGV retrospective and, in late 2024, Snakes and Mirrors at the Museum of Australian Photography – her ultra-refined images are rendered with hyperreal precision, subverting the coolly seductive language of advertising while drawing motifs from classical myth and folklore. Projecting a beguiling equipoise against crisp, ambiguous backdrops, the outward polish and quietude of her subjects is undercut by tension, eroticism or disquiet – qualities dialled up to a spellbinding degree in her new work, Fate Spinner. Arriving after record auction results for her historical works, editions of Fate Spinner can now be acquired by request.

Please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au for acquisition enquiries.

Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is proud to bring to Auckland select works from the decades-spanning archive of Queensland-born, Eora/Sydney-based photographer, performance artist and cultural pioneer William Yang. Awarded the Legacy Prize at this year’s Asia Pacific Arts Awards, Yang has been among the most important and prolific chroniclers of Australian life for more than 50 years, capturing with empathy, candour and clarity the celebrated and the marginalised, the public and the personal. From his works of social documentary – lensed at the front lines of the parties, protests and performances through which Australian LGBTQIA+ identity, autonomy and community were expressed and defined – to his intimate, diaristic portraits of family, friends and lovers, often set amid the ravages of the AIDS era, Yang has built an extraordinary body of work that now stands among the most significant social archives of the past half-century.

For acquisition enquiries please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Following her celebrated solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin, German-born, Baltic Sea-based contemporary photographer Kristin Schnell will exhibit two works in Auckland from her acclaimed Farewell series. This showing extends a growing engagement with Antipodean collectors that feels tied to her choice of subjects; an affinity for our region’s native birdlife has been a touchstone for Schnell’s flights of photographic fancy, as evidenced by the work that saw her shortlisted for the 2025 Head On Photo Awards. “My bird models are originally from Australia. Colonial trade carried their ancestors to Europe,” says Schnell. “With the Head On Festival, they return home – at least visually – and that makes me very happy.”

In the sumptuous, moody photographs of Farewell – awash with a sense of romantic, old-world painterly lushness – the vibrant plumage of Schnell’s birds appears frozen in motion as it dissolves into cascading flowers and a velvety blackness beyond. While the prevailing atmosphere of Farewell is one of luxuriant beauty, Schnell brings conceptual depth into the frame. As her subjects refuse the camera-facing conventions of classical portraiture, appearing in flux and resisting our gaze as they disappear into a floral plane, we are invited to consider their bidding farewell as a parting gesture at a time of ecological collapse.

For acquisition enquiries please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

In New Zealand, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin will present a spectacular new suite of works by acclaimed Ngan’gikurrungurr artist, cultural leader and master weaver Regina Pilawuk Wilson. The Cultural Director at Durrmu Arts, co-founder of the Peppimenarti Community and a seminal figure in the story of Australian First Nations art, Wilson has been a fixture on the global art scene for almost three decades, with her works held in the collections of the British Museum and LACMA, alongside almost every major institution Australia-wide. Most recently a finalist in the 2025 Sir John Sulman Prize, she has received a succession of accolades since her defining win at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2003.

In Auckland, Wilson will show a new series of syaw (fish net) paintings, which channel her mastery of a generations-spanning weaving tradition into canvases soaked in colour and alive with rhythmic, reverberating movement that unspools from a central axis in ribboning, linear strokes. “My grandfather, before European contact, used to make fish traps to put in the rivers and billabongs,” says Wilson, whose presence at the fair follows her showing in Washington, D.C., where she was received by then-Ambassador to the United States, Dr Kevin Rudd AC. “My sister said for me to put the design onto the canvas so I can tell the story.” By placing her epic canvases in dialogue with her woven work, our art fair exhibition draws together two strands of her practice, connecting the sinuous linework of her paintings to the weaving that informs them.

For acquisition enquiries please contact tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au

Our Aotearoa Art Fair presentation will take visitors into the atmospheric worlds of Auckland-born, Eora/Sydney-based contemporary photographer Scott Perkins with the debut of a significant new body of work – his first since the widely acclaimed Uncertain Truths at Michael Reid Sydney in early 2025. With remarkable clarity, precision and technical bravura, Perkins captures natural environments that suggest a space beyond the purely visible. “There is more than one kind of alchemy at work, as we, the viewers, are drawn inexorably into the very essence of each frame,” writes Mary Kisler MNZM – author, art historian and longtime Senior Curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – in the essay accompanying Perkins’s fair-bound series.

“Paradoxically, while we see the land, sea and sky through Perkins’ eye, they also become landscapes of the mind,” writes Kisler. “We lose sight of the quotidian ephemera that surrounds us, to seemingly stand alone in the presence of an ineffable, primordial beauty.” The otherworldly aura of Perkins’s nature scenes is heightened by the experience of accessing them via portal-like frames and softly glowing light-boxes that pull the viewer into a world of brooding romanticism and quietude. These works operate as much as sculptural objects as photographs, transforming the spaces they inhabit through considered lighting and fine materials, including handmade Japanese washi and metallic Hahnemühle papers.

For acquisition information prior to the art fair please contact hughholm@michaelreid.com.au