Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present a joint exhibition from sisters Priscilla Singer and Trisha Singer – two bright stars within the celebrated school of First Nations painters at Iwantja Arts in the rocky desert country of Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands.

Since its founding in the early 1980s, Iwantja Arts has played a vital role in championing Aṉangu self-determination and cultural expression – a legacy inseparable from the work of Priscilla and Trisha’s mother, the late artist Kunmanara (Sadie) Singer, who co-founded Iwantja Arts alongside Alec Baker. A revered artist, cultural leader and advocate, Sadie Singer’s influence continues to resonate through the practices of her daughters.

Anchoring the two sisters’ joint exhibition, Tali Ngura Wiru – Beautiful Sandhill Country, are two newly completed, large-scale diptychs – one by each artist – conceived as twin pillars around which a constellation of vibrant canvases now circulate. Together, these works trace a shared geography while allowing space for individual cadence, colour and mark-making to emerge.

“I’ve been making art since I was a young girl,” says Trisha Singer, who paints Tali Ngura – sandhill Country – on Yankunytjatjara land. “You can see sandhills in the colours I use, desert colours, with dusty reds and oranges. I paint the important places that I know well, that my mother shared with me. There’s a lot of my mum in my work – what she liked and what she taught me. I like looking at different flowers, and going on Country and getting the knowledge of the land, and the story, passed on from grandparents … When you travel, you see the changes in the land. It comes alive.”

For Priscilla Singer, a senior Pitjantjatjara woman and long-time leader within the Iwantja community, painting is an act of remembrance, transmission and care. “When I’m painting, I always think about my grandfather’s Country and my mother’s painting. I try to paint the places they travelled around,” she says. “I look to my mum’s painting and show some of that same story in my work. I paint the red sand. The red sand never changes; it is always here. When the sun sets, you can see the glow of the earth. I paint this country so people can see my land, they can appreciate its beauty and understand its power.”

Family, language and collective strength sit at the heart of both artists’ practices. “Family and community are so important to Aṉangu culture,” says Priscilla Singer, who previously exhibited her work to great acclaim in the 2025 Michael Reid Southern Highlands group show Ngura Pilunpa – Peaceful Country. “Our connection to each other and to our Country informs everything we do, especially making art and passing on culture to our younger generations. Being together makes us strong.”

For enquiries, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrated Meanjin/Brisbane-based contemporary painter and master of the still life John Honeywill returns to Michael Reid Sydney in August for his first solo exhibition in more than two years. Brought to life with meticulous precision and masterly control of light and mood, Honeywill’s paintings set everyday objects within deceptively simple compositions that appear quietly radiant and seemingly lit from within.

His acclaimed practice is propelled by a curious, almost ineffable affinity for the objects of his gaze – unsentimental yet emotionally resonant subjects that draw the eye with the quiet authority of their presence. From sugary sweets to elegant vessels enclosing fruit or delicately unfolding flowers, these still-life elements exude a serene stillness and subtle alchemy as they coalesce and converse in graceful, mesmerising arrangements.

By suspending these objects against ambiguous, softly luminescent planes – at times subtly reflective, at others gauze-like and atmospheric – and rendering them with astonishing, ultra-precise detail, Honeywill heightens their sense of poise and intimacy. His paintings stand as a paean to the interplay between an object’s presence and the artist’s perception – the organising idea behind his 2023 monograph, Presence and Perception.

To sign up for first access to the artist’s forthcoming series, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Sid Pattni’s practice is concerned with how aesthetics shaped under empire can be reclaimed and reconfigured to tell new stories about migration, memory and identity. In Small Fires Everywhere, All The Time, faceless figures sit at the centre of sumptuously embellished portraits edged by ornate decorative borders, each adorned with painted floral patterns, gold-leaf animal motifs and hand-beaded appliqué. Wrapped in opulent regalia and pictorially ensconced within their nested frames, Pattni’s subjects project the pomp and grandiosity of historical portraiture, but with only their eyes left floating amid a cosmic, void-like abyss. Stripped of what is conventionally read as a portrait’s defining feature, these eyes without a face upend the power dynamics of their historical precedents and send us looking for markers of identity and meaning within the structures and stylised flourishes that enclose them.

“This body of work explores the psychological afterlife of empire,” says the Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and 2025 Archibald Prize finalist. “The paintings depict women who historically operated as symbols of purity, civility and moral authority, helping construct a hierarchy that cast the West as ordered and the colonised world as unruly and inferior. Rather than depicting individuals, these paintings treat them as an ideological apparatus that enforced power through imagery.”

Referencing Mughal miniatures, Indian textiles, British botanical illustration and 19th-century Company Painting – a genre that is itself a complex hybrid, melding Rajput and Mughal traditions with Western conventions and shaped by fraught politics of patronage and spectacle – Pattni weaves a dynamic tapestry from styles, symbols and compositional logics remixed and remade. The resulting works ask how selfhood might be similarly pieced together – cut from the cloth of cultural inheritances and external projections – and how internalised hierarchies might be unsettled by imagining their visual antecedents anew.

“Growing up within the Indian diaspora in Australia, I recognise how inherited visual hierarchies continue to organise my own mind,” says Pattni, who was born in London and spent his early years in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth. He describes his latest series as less concerned with historical reconstruction than with interrupting history’s lingering psychological echoes. “Repainting these figures becomes an act of re-encounter.”

In these acts of re-encounter, the flattened pictorial space and nested framing of Mughal miniatures become forms of containment; their embellishments a site of critique. “The animals surrounding the figures function simultaneously as record and metaphor,” he says. “They reference the impulse of classification and documentation imposed by the British while resisting containment through constant movement, reflecting an identity that is negotiated rather than fixed.”

Small Fires Everywhere, All The Time arrives after a banner year for the artist, who was shortlisted for the 2025 Archibald Prize and Lester Prize and presented his first solo exhibition with Michael Reid Sydney after joining the gallery’s stable in May. The exhibition is Pattni’s most ambitious solo presentation to date and commences a series of major projects, culminating in the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris – awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and accompanied by Pattni’s first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin.

“Pattni invites us to examine the inheritances that exist within the subconscious of our collective and individual psyche,” writes Louise Martin-Chew in an eight-page Vault magazine cover story. “His criticality sits within an aesthetic that is richly decorated, beautiful and seductive.”

For enquiries, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au