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

Tamara Dean’s magnificent entanglements of human and natural worlds reach a wild crescendo with her operatic new series of lushly romantic, hyper-floral photographs, The Flower Duet – a landmark body of work in which lithe figures plunge through prismatic thresholds in a dazzling pas de deux with camellias, roses and other blooms.

While Dean’s fecund fantasias might at first appear like digitally conjured dreamscapes, they are, in fact, an extraordinary feat of practical effects, with the artist immersing and lensing her subjects in actual gardens and elaborately constructed underwater sets.

To receive further information about works in this exhibition, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au

Across February, Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan’s deeply personal, visually epic stories of Country will unfold in a dynamic, colour-soaked display in the upstairs exhibition space at Michael Reid Sydney, when her solo exhibition Kuṉpu – Strength officially opens from Thursday February 7.

Working at Iwantja Arts – the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre in the rocky desert country of Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytatjara Lands (APY Lands), the Yankunytjatjara artist is at the forefront of one of the most exuberant, innovative and globally celebrated movements in contemporary painting.

Kuṉpu – Strength sees five new paintings grace the gallery walls and coincides with Cullinan’s inclusion in Art Collector magazine’s annual 50 Things issue. Paintings on view introduce a refreshing spectrum of warm colours into the artist’s compositions.

Kuṉpu – Strength will preview by appointment at Michael Reid Sydney before opening officially on Thursday  February 7, 2025. To receive further information about works of art exhibiting in this exhibition, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

In January, Michael Reid Sydney will exhibit 20 significant Australian photographs – across two folios of ten masterworks each – bringing together iconic artworks by Australia’s most celebrated 20th-century photographers, spanning six decades of cultural and artistic evolution.

These two master suites of ten photographs each capture the nation’s diverse creative vision and much of our core photographic history. From Olive Cotton’s elegant Teacup Ballet to Mervyn Bishop’s powerful portrayal of Indigenous land rights and Greg Weight’s portrait of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, these images reflect Australia’s ever-changing social and environmental narrative.

Showcasing masterful storytelling and enduring legacies, the two folios are cornerstones of Australian photography.

For further information about this exhibition please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Sydney will commence the calendar year with a presentation of Trent Parke’s Species series. Species made its Australian debut with a selection of photographs at Sydney Contemporary 2024. In January, we will present a more comprehensive collection draw from this technically astounding photographic series.

Photographs from Species have already garnered international acclaim after being shown at Milan Design Week in a touring exhibition specially commissioned by Magnum Photos and Veuve Clicquot. A centrepiece of the series was selected for Australia’s most prestigious photo-based media award, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.

Captured through an extraordinary feat of endurance and technical wizardry, Species is a thrilling synthesis of Parke’s exceptional skill and aesthetic sensibilities. “Shooting directly into the sun, with what could be considered a telescope, is a challenge in itself,” says the artist, who lensed his subjects from a distance of 700 metres. “It was 1/2000th of a second, but three months in the making.”

Parke sees Species as a meeting of two “symbols of universal energy” – the sun and the ocean melting together in a sumptuous pool of colour.

Photographs from this exhibition can be viewed at Michael Reid Sydney. To discuss and acquisition, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

This month, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin will present the latest work by leading Australian contemporary artist Catherine Nelson, who brilliantly recasts digital tools as a paintbrush for conjuring wildly immersive, impossible landscapes.

“From her studio in France, Nelson’s meditation on the Australian landscape carries the weight of distance, nostalgic romanticism, and the clarity of perspective that such remove can provide,” notes art adviser and writer Sarah Hetherington in the catalogue essay accompanying Nelson’s extraordinary new pair of works, Riverbound I and II.

Each image is a painstaking, labour-intensive digital construction, where every element is composed of dozens of photographs, creating what Nelson refers to as “distortion on distortion” or a type of hyper-collaging. Nelson’s intention is to capture “a more honest image that reflects my experience and emotional response to this staggeringly beautiful and unique part of the world.” Further, Riverbound marks a significant departure from Nelson’s macro/micro spherical previous series of works. Now the viewer is positioned within the scene rather than observing from afar.

Riverbound I and II reject the traditional single-point perspective of photography and are particularly striking in their temporal and spatial complexity. Instead, the images offer something more akin to the way memory works – an immersive, multi-layered experience. The tilted plane of the river becomes a mirror, the space between the sky and its reflection in the water is collapsed. Nelson describes this as “an absence of separation,” a unity that also speaks to an ecological interconnectedness.

For further information please email dean@michaelreid.com.au.