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

Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is delighted to welcome a new offering of large-scale paintings by Raylene Walatinna. The Yankunytjatjara artist’s most expansive collection of works to date is showing throughout February across two distinct sites – both within the ground-floor exhibition space at our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery and as a highlight of our next major foray into the United States.

A senior Yankunytjatjara woman and established painter at Iwantja Arts – the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre in the rocky desert country of Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands – Walatinna is the daughter and frequent collaborator of globally acclaimed artist, Iwantja Arts director and three-time Wynne Prize finalist Betty Chimney, as well as an exceptional talent in her own right.

Walatinna often works collaboratively with her mother, continuing the custom of older women passing on knowledge of Tjukurpa (Aṉangu cultural stories) and Ngura (Country) to younger generations. Revealing the influence of her trailblazing mother, Walatinna’s work channels the tones and elemental rhythms of the desert in a celebration of her enduring connection to Country and Yankunytjatjara culture.

As a solo artist, Walatinna produces a limited volume of work, making each new offering a keenly anticipated occasion. Having now completed her most ambitiously scaled body of work yet, she makes her Michael Reid Sydney debut, after previously headlining our Murrurundi gallery’s collaborative exhibition with Country Style magazine, Heirloom, and showing alongside several Iwantja Arts peers in the group exhibition Ngura pilunpa – Peaceful Country at Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

“My mum has always been my closest friend. I learnt how to paint from her – she is a very good teacher. Over time, I’ve developed my own way of working too,” says Walatinna in a profile published in Country Style’s 2025 Art Issue, which coincided with the opening of Heirloom and featured Walatinna’s work on its cover. “My paintings are different to my mum’s – even though we are often painting the same Country. Our shapes usually connect in different ways, and we have different ideas on how to use colour.”

A selection of Walatinna’s newly completed paintings will travel to the United States for the gallery’s forthcoming collaboration with leading Californian contemporary art space LA Loma. Marking the second instalment of Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s stateside survey The Stars Before Us All: Australian First Nations Art following its widely celebrated Washington, D.C. run, our Los Angeles exhibition at LA Loma will see Walatinna exhibit alongside her mother and several other luminaries of contemporary First Nations painting.

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

Michael Reid Sydney will commence our 2026 exhibitions program with the most ambitious project to date from Eora/Sydney-based contemporary painter Kathy Liu. Now available to preview digitally and in person by request, Liu’s new series takes the title Odyssey both as a nod to the Classical Greco-Roman inflections of the curious, inchoate forms that play out within her abstract compositions – figures that slowly cohere through gossamer clouds of colour, lending her large-scale paintings the feeling of a faded fresco or timeworn tapestry – and to the open-ended process that produced them. For Liu, this approach is another odyssey of sorts, embracing the serendipitous digressions and chance encounters that emerge through her painterly wanderings.

“None were preplanned,” says the artist, whose forthcoming solo exhibition will be her first to unfold across our entire flagship ground-floor space. “Instead of letting the idea lead to action, I reversed this, beginning with action, letting myself embark on a personal odyssey, a wander towards the notion of an idea. It’s almost like a jack-in-the-box, full of surprises, and I enjoy surprising myself.” Awash with an almost celestial luminosity, Odyssey represents a confident and sophisticated honing of Liu’s singular vision and technique, even while her methods remain open to the unexpected, ethereal and ineffable possibilities of an intuitive abstract practice – a process likened to “a game of chance” in a 2024 Belle magazine profile.

“What might begin as an exercise in loose, tonal abstraction can take a delightfully unexpected turn as amorphous pools begin to coalesce and playfully enigmatic, inchoate figures emerge through diaphanous wafts of colour,” noted the Belle story. “Redolent of hazy memories, nocturnal musings or half-remembered dreams, the resulting compositions feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement.”

Discussing her Odyssey series, Liu says she imagines her paintings as a visual analogue to stream-of-consciousness writing – bringing another literary dimension to a series that feels imbued, albeit with delightful ambiguities, with gestures to classical tales, epic narratives and oral histories held in the mind’s eye. “Just as our thought processes are very rarely linear and defined, my works, an introspective reflection of the subconscious mind, don’t present clearly bound storylines,” says the artist. “Instead, I would like to invite my audience to wander through the paintings, to explore the potential narratives within them.”

To sign up for early previews and first access to works from Odyssey by Kathy Liu – or book a private viewing before the 2025 Christmas holidays – please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

A major highlight of the official artistic program at the 2026 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival, Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti opens in February at Michael Reid Sydney and marks the Tiwi Islands artist and dancer’s first large-scale solo exhibition since his star turn in our annual survey Painting Now.

Set to walk alongside the Sistagirls in the 2026 Mardi Gras Parade, Tipungwuti is a significant presence within the Tiwi Islands community and an artist whose highly distinctive painting practice continues to draw strong institutional and collector interest across Australia and abroad.

Tipungwuti’s Murrakupupuni (Country) is Wurankuwu, a homeland inherited through his father’s family, while his tribe, Wulinjuwula (Mosquito), comes from his matrilineal line. Having performed ballet in Eora/Sydney in the 1980s, he is also an accomplished dancer. “My father danced Jarranga (buffalo) and my mother danced Ampiji (rainbow),” says Tipungwuti, who continues to perform at ceremony and events where there is yoyi (dance). “My totem is buffalo, but when some of those women who are related through my mother’s side dance Ampiji, I join in, too.”

Across his striking monochrome works on bark and canvas, Tipungwuti depicts the celestial figures at the heart of Tiwi ceremonial culture: Japarra, the moon-man who brought mortality into the world, and japalinga, the stars whose ochred forms adorn dancers during 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 recounts Japarra’s encounter with Purukuparli and Wai-ai, the death of their child, and his ascent to the sky, where his white light reminds the Tiwi people of the cycle 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.”

Rendered in stark black and white, the ancestral moon-man appears, by turns, solemn, playful and elemental; his face endlessly compelling. “Japarra is white – the moon-man has a white body. All the stars are white and the moon is white too,” Tipungwuti explains of his palette, made from white ochre collected on Country at Wurankuwu. “I want to share my story and the story of my painting with people from all over the world.”

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Tipungwuti’s work was shown to great acclaim in 2025 at UNSW Galleries in Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New, curated by José Da Silva with Jilamara Arts.

“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.”

Works from Japarra (The Moonman) by Columbiere Tipungwuti will be available to preview and acquire in the lead-up to the show’s opening in February as part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras festival. For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au