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

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present a specially curated companion exhibition to The Stars Before Us All – our upcoming exhibition of contemporary First Nations art in Washington, D.C. Ahead of our show’s opening in the US capital on Wednesday, 15 October, Michael Reid Sydney’s expansive presentation of The Stars Before Us All is now unfolding across the entire exhibition space at our flagship gallery in Chippendale and will continue concurrently with our stateside survey throughout October.

This significant group exhibition offers local collectors and gallery visitors the opportunity to experience and acquire extraordinary new and historical work by more than 15 luminaries of contemporary First Nations art at a watershed moment during which their practice is being celebrated on the international stage.

Reflecting the project’s international scope, the Eora/Sydney edition of The Stars Before Us All supports the gallery’s ambition to embed First Nations art within a globe-spanning network of collectors, curators and institutions, joining the cross-cultural dialogue forged by the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark touring exhibition The Stars We Do Not See, which will travel across North America over the next two years following its debut at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Echoing the work of the NGV and the National Gallery of Art, The Stars Before Us All highlights practising First Nations artists and key historical works, offering a contemporary complement to the NGV’s sweeping institutional survey. The Eora/Sydney edition of The Stars Before Us All is anchored by a significant suite of historical works by Regina Pilawuk Wilson, who will travel to Washington, D.C. this month as the guest of honour at our opening celebration for The Stars Before Us All – the first occasion for her to visit the room named in her honour at the Australian Embassy to the United States.

Joining Wilson in the exhibition’s local contingent is Kuninjku artist Owen Yalandja, who was awarded the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award at this year’s Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, as well as Yankunytjatjara artist and three-time Wynne Prize finalist Betty Chimney, Yolŋu artist Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa and many more. The exhibition also features a sublime painting by the late visionary Emily Kam Kngwarray, whose career-spanning retrospective is currently on view at the Tate Modern in London, and a work by the late Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori.

To discuss works from The Stars Before Us All, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au

From the time of her first exhibition in 1925 Margaret Preston established herself as the most important artist printmaker working in Australia. The exhibition received critical and popular acclaim. It was described in the press as ‘a riot of colour’ and sold exceptionally well. The most desirable works were those dealing with Australian flora; Preston hand-coloured them in gouache which enabled her to exploit the effects of vibrant, saturated colours. Her work quickly became iconic, being illustrated in journals like Art in Australia and The Home and being acquired by public galleries.  The exhibition also marked the beginning of Preston’s commitment to the development of a national Australian art.

This important group of eight prints span the most productive years of Preston’s involvement with woodblock printmaking – ranging from her 1925 exhibition until 1939.

In Native flowers (1925), an arrangement of flannel flowers, Sturt desert peas and Christmas bells in a blue bowl, the flowers have a jewel-like quality, appearing vibrant against the solid black background. This was one of the best-known prints from the 1925 exhibition following its reproduction on the cover of Art in Australia in December of that year.

Throughout the twenties Preston continued to experiment with still lives of native flowers, the compositions becoming bolder and more commanding. She also produced landscapes of the Sydney foreshore. When Preston settled in Sydney in 1920, she lived in the harbourside suburb of Mosman and went on to produce several prints which show her affection for this picturesque location. Mosman Bridge (1927), one such view, was selected by the artist to accompany her monograph Margaret Preston: Recent paintings 1929. All impressions of this print are slightly different. Preston was not interested in printing in colour, but hand coloured each print, the distribution of colour often varying, imparting each with its own vitality.

By the end of the decade Preston’s still life prints had become highly abstracted. Gum blossoms (1928) is one of the outstanding prints of this period, the artist carefully designing a floral arrangement with a pre-determined pictorial composition in mind. The subtly coloured round gum flowers and triangular leaves push out to the edges of the image, constrained by the rigid black lines that define the composition.    

In the early 1930s Preston moved to live in Berowra, a rural area surrounded by dense native bush. She was aged in her early sixties and was recovering from surgery. Prints produced by Preston after this time are all rare. Whereas in the early 1920s her editions usually numbered 50 or 25, later editions are small, numbering only two or three, and in many cases impressions are unique. This is the case with Old Banksia Tree (1939), one of Preston’s most important prints from her Berowra years. The tree was located at the bottom of her property, gnarled by age but still productive; Preston obviously identified with it (there is a photograph of her standing next to it).

In this impression, the woodcut is not hand-coloured, but the artist has introduced background tone that emphasises the isolation and vulnerability of the tree. Produced on the cusp of the Second World War it marked the end to Preston’s Berowra phase of her career.

Roger Butler AM

Emeritus Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

National Gallery of Australia