Melbourne/Naarm painter Chelsea Gustafsson makes her European debut in presenting a full solo exhibition of new paintings at Michael Reid Berlin, taking place in mid 2025. Gustafsson’s highly charged and mysterious still life miniatures oppose their scale, offering viewers a kaleidoscope of stories within each tiny tableaux.
For more information about Chelsea Gustafsson’s Berlin exhibition, please contact colinesoria@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
In his first exhibition with Michael Reid Berlin, William Yang demonstrates his extraordinary artistic and cultural legacy. Comprised of fourteen key photographs spanning five decades, Yang’s titular exhibition is a curated assemblage of iconic and important works of social documentary. Lensed at the front lines of the parties, protests and performances through which LGBTQ+ identity, autonomy and politics came to be defined, Yang’s radically intimate, diaristic images are regarded as one of the most important social archives of the last 50 years. On view are a selection of photographs largely pulled from three seminal thematic exhibitions, Sydneyphiles, Bloodlinks and Friends of Dorothy.
Visitors to Yang’s first Michael Reid Berlin show will recognise among his subjects some of the most important and influential figures in the story of recent art and culture, including Pina Bausch, Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Brett Whiteley and Cate Blanchett. These creative cynosures appear alongside less familiar faces who have nonetheless loomed large in the artist’s own story, and as the stars of his most iconic and indelible images. In John’s Bedroom, 1980, Yang captures a young man named Allan hunched coyly in the bedroom of a popular Surry Hills gay hangout. Allan would later become the subject of William Yang’s masterpiece, Allan, which documents the ravages of the AIDS virus with dignity and tenderness.
On two occasions Yang’s own likeness appears in this exhibition, Self Portrait #2, 1947/2008 and William in Scholars Costume, 1984/2009, two principal images in the artists oeuvre. Displayed chronologically, these photographs unpack Yang’s Chinese-Australian identity, illustrating his experience of having to “come out” twice.
Propelling his works rich capacity for storytelling are handwritten notes, journalistic recollections scrawled across the surface of his photographic images. These wonderfully insightful visual devices reanimate Yang’s subjects, offering intimate reflections on how the pictures came to be.
For more information regarding photographs available to acquire, please contact colinesoria@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
Rising art star Julz Beresford will present a full solo exhibition at The Basil Sellers Art Centre, Moruya for Michael Reid Beyond. This exhibition will be the first opportunity to acquire the artist’s work in 2025. Those wishing to acquire a Julz Beresford painting are encouraged to make contact today.
Please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au for information about paintings that can be acquired immediately.
With her spectacular new installation, Doba Nation, Dharawal/Bulli-based artist Mai Nguyễn-Long transports the viewer to a sprawling archipelago of hand-formed ceramic sculptures, now on view at John Curtin Gallery, WA.
Assembled on-site in a process akin to live storytelling and emerging spotlit against the moody scenography of a darkened exhibition space, Nguyễn-Long’s monumental installation is a landmark achievement and a dazzling centrepiece of the 2025 Perth Festival‘s artistic program.
In this dynamic assemblage, the artist’s distinctive Vomit Girl figures coalesce with the cylindrical painted ceramic forms she calls Doba. These derive their appearance from metal bomb shell casings that some residents of rural Vietnam have repurposed for practical and spiritual use.
“In this new body of work, Mai pays particular attention to brushwork illustration on the surfaces of her ceramic objects, which borrow from the southern Vietnamese folk religious motifs of her father’s birthplace, merged with personalised symbology,” notes the exhibition curator, Lia McKnight.
Co-presented by our offsite projects platform, Michael Reid Beyond, Doba Nation arrives soon after Nguyễn-Long’s landmark installation at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, The Vomit Girl Project, which is showing at Brisbane’s QAGOMA until 27 April.
All works featured within the artist’s Doba Nation exhibition are available to acquire from Michael Reid Sydney, with select pieces already accessible online and additional works available by request. We encourage collectors to contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au to request details – including availability, size and price – for any sculptures not shown online or in our digital catalogue.
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
