Narelle Autio: Sydney Contemporary 2024

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Narelle Autio: Sydney Contemporary 2024

  • Artist
    Narelle Autio
  • Dates
    5—8 Sep 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Sydney Contemporary 2024

Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin will present a spectacular new series of photographs by award-winning artist Narelle Autio at the 2024 edition of Sydney Contemporary.

Titled The Eyes of Her, the artist’s latest series plunges the viewer into mesmerising underwater worlds where ethereal figures swim from the inky depths towards the surface via effervescent swells and sweeping undulations.

“[I’m interested in] how beautiful [the water and ocean] can be, but also the beauty and danger coming together in a transformative space,” says Autio in a recent ABC profile.

The ocean has been an enduring muse for Autio, whose dazzling return to underwater photography – a practice she has perfected over three decades – follows an acclaimed solo exhibition of never-before-seen images drawn from her archive.

That show’s deep dive into her past work – combined with the expanded possibilities of a newly acquired, much larger digital camera – has now informed a sublime new suite of dreamlike images that subtly gesture to the mythical associations between women and water.

“Across the world, folk tales regale us with stories of mermaids, selkies and water sprites,” says Autio, reflecting on the thematic currents that emerged, quite unexpectedly, through the making of her new photographs. “Otherworldly creatures enticing us into the sea.”

Autio’s practice is animated by a mix of extraordinary technical rigour and the serendipitous possibilities of her immersive process. “The jetty is packed and full of humanity,” says the artist, whose images seem tinged with nostalgic affection for endless summer days by the sea.

“[Jetty jumpers] are just having fun, doing good things and just living – by circumstance and happenstance, you get something beautiful.”

To receive an early preview and priority access to works from The Eyes of Her by Narelle Autio, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

New Paintings

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New Paintings

  • Artist
    John Honeywill
  • Dates
    15 Aug—14 Sep 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Eora / Sydney

Across August and September, Michael Reid Sydney will exhibit the latest series of luminous still life paintings by celebrated Brisbane-based artist, John Honeywill.

Honeywill’s practice is propelled by the elusive, ineffable power of objects that hold his eye. By isolating these affinities against ambiguous, radiant planes, Honeywill manages to render his subjects with a meticulous precision that approaches the hyperreal. From sugary sweets to vessels enclosing peonies, magnolias or fruits, the artist’s closely observed subjects all appear lit from within.

This is John Honeywill’s fifth solo exhibition with the Gallery and his second in our Chippendale gallery space. New Paintings by John Honeywill will exhibit between 15 August and 14 September, with an opening reception occurring on Thursday 15 August, 6-8pm. The artist will be in attendance. Our event is open to all and will be sponsored by Sammy Piquant.

For more information on the artist’s work, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Unproduced Screenplay

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Unproduced Screenplay

  • Artist
    Samuel Leighton-Dore
  • Dates
    15 Aug—14 Sep 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Eora / Sydney

Across August and September, Michael Reid Sydney will invite guest artist, Samuel Leighton-Dore to transform our mezzanine gallery by presenting a 220-piece wall based ceramic installation. Unproduced Screenplay (excerpt) is a visually delightful collision of disciplines that playfully interrogates social behaviour in public art spaces. Having recently exhibited at Tweed Regional Gallery, Unproduced Screenplay (excerpt) will show in a commercial gallery context for the first time, bringing a new dimension to the commentary threaded within the delicately constructed work of art.

Each piece of this ambitious installation is a hand-made ceramic form that collectively assemble to echo the typeface and layout of a film script. In its presence, the viewer assumes the role as protagonist, with the gallery behaving as the setting to an art themed micro-scene. Leighton-Dore’s work encourages the consideration of how we interact with contemporary art, and what role we play in imbuing art with meaning.

Unproduced Screenplay will exhibit between 15 August and 14 September, with an opening reception occurring on Thursday 15 August, 6-8pm. The artist will be in attendance. Our event is open to all and will be sponsored by Sammy Piquant.

For more information on the artist’s work, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Samuel Leighton-Dore is a screenwriter, director, published author and visual artist who lives and works on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Across multiple intersecting disciplines, Leighton-Dore’s work brings a sense of heart and humour to complex themes of identity, sexuality and psychology.

Photos by Sabine Bannard and Aaron Chapman

The Hunt

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We are thrilled to present the latest release from leading contemporary Australian artist Joseph McGlennon. Titled The Hunt, this spectacular new suite of sweeping, panoramic scenes is a landmark entry in the artist’s celebrated body of work and the culmination of more than a decade of unparalleled photographic mastery.

The Hunt will debut with a special presentation from our offsite projects platform, Michael Reid Beyond, where the works will be staged against the gracefully weathered grandeur of the original colonial homestead at Throsby Park – a suitably handsome setting for the artist’s singular blend of old-world sumptuousness and bold contemporary vision.

The recipient of the 2015 Bowness Photography Prize – the country’s most prestigious award for photography – McGlennon’s work is held in numerous private and public art collections in Australia and abroad. His hybrid photographic practice is underpinned by an extraordinary technical rigour, producing images that meld lavish beauty with a powerful message about environmental fragility, colonial dislocation and the destructive folly of our attempts to dominate nature.

With his majestic recreations of animals in their habitats – from the first kangaroos seen by European eyes to the extinct Tasmanian Tiger fresh from killing its prey – the artist brings his subjects out of the realm of exotic specimen or historical curiosity and pushes them, living and breathing, into today.

Drawing on the primal tooth-and-claw drama of a 17th-century European deer hunt reimagined in the New World of colonial Australia, The Hunt marks a dazzling departure from the orthodoxies of contemporary photography by paying homage to the great Flemish painter Frans Snyders.

Looking back across time to march contemporary art forward, this collection of six new photographs channels the emotional elements of Snyder’s style: attention to detail, dramatic lighting and rich textures. These absorbing details add depth and complexity to the narrative, emphasising the interplay between light and shadow and creating a sense of movement within each image.

The components of these sprawling, tapestry-like scenes were all captured on a trip through the rugged outback landscapes around Castle Rock in the Flinders Ranges area of South Australia. After shooting hundreds of individual photographs, McGlennon spends weeks layering and arranging them to arrive at his final composition.

Throsby Park is a property of national significance, marking one of the first European settlements outside Sydney and the opening of the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. The Throsby Park Historic Site includes the 75-hectare core of the 400-hectare grant given to Dr. Charles Throsby in 1819. This rare, surviving property offers a strong sense of continuity from its early colonial origins and continuous family ownership. It symbolizes early colonial Australia and the lifestyle of its wealthier members, reflecting its use as an intense commercial mixed farm until Charles Throsby’s death in 1856.

The site is an intact example of a high-quality, intensely farmed cultural landscape that spurred rural expansion and squatting empires. It features rare 1830s farm buildings, played a key role in developing the colonial beef export industry, and is now known for equestrian activities. The property also contains archaeological deposits offering insights into its colonial activities. Conrad Martens celebrated Throsby Park’s qualities in a 1836 painting.

Throsby Park House, the centerpiece, possibly influenced by John Verge, is a significant milestone in Australian rural architecture. An early example of the ‘large verandahed cottage’ style, it sits atop a hill overlooking Moss Vale, making a strong visual statement with its position and surrounding landscape. The house, along with its furniture, represents the blend of English architectural demands, colonial climate, building conditions, and the aspirations of its builder.”

Michael Reid OAM

 

To receive a preview of The Hunt by Joseph McGlennon, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Mythologies

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Mythologies

  • Artist
    Petrina Hicks
  • Dates
    16 Aug—27 Sep 2024
  • Catalogue
    Download now
  • Gallery Location
    Perth Council House Gallery, Eora / Sydney, Beyond

We are thrilled to announce the return of Petrina Hicks to the West Australian capital with her upcoming solo exhibition, Mythologies, at Perth Council House Gallery.

Co-presented by the Perth Centre for Photography and our offsite projects platform, Michael Reid Beyond, this expansive public installation will mark the release of a spectacular suite of new works by the artist.

Staged alongside some of the most arresting and indelible images from Hicks’s archive and a suite of new sculptural works by acclaimed Perth-based contemporary artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, these four new releases will form an exclusive preview of an upcoming body of work by Hicks that will debut later this year at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne.

Hicks is among Australia’s most esteemed and globally celebrated contemporary artists, having honed her distinctive photographic style and cemented her place at the forefront of her field over an extraordinary career spanning more than two decades.

The artist’s meticulously choreographed images are lensed with a heightened degree of precision that conjures an air of hyperreality, quoting and subverting the coolly seductive visual language of advertising while drawing motifs and symbolic allusions from classical mythology, folklore and art history.

Hovering in porous, indistinct spaces between different states of being – human and animal, adolescent and adult, static and inchoate – Hicks’s animals, totemic objects and female subjects project a beguiling equipoise against crisp, ambiguous backdrops, with their outward polish, stillness and quietude appealingly undercut by tension, eroticism or disquiet.

“In Hicks’s work we are drawn to the tiniest gesture or detail amplified beyond mundane reality into a zone of the imaginary,” writes curator Isobel Crombie in the monograph published to coincide with the artist’s major 2018 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Bleached Gothic.

Hicks’s Perth exhibition will be the capstone to a remarkable year, continuing a national tour and arriving soon after the record-smashing sale of her 2005 work Shenae & Jade at auction – a fantastic result for the artist and a watershed moment for the contemporary photography market more broadly.

To register interest in Mythologies by Petrina Hicks and receive early previews of her upcoming releases, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Yawkyawk

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Yawkyawk

  • Artist
    Owen Yalandja
  • Dates
    18 Jul—15 Aug 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Eora / Sydney

Michael Reid Sydney welcomes the latest body of work by Kuninjku artist Owen Yalandja, the winner of the Telstra Bark Painting Award at the 2023 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

This exhibition pools a series of Yalandja’s carved Mimih figures alongside his intricate paintings on bark for a dazzling dive through the stories of the Ancestral female freshwater spirit, the yawkyawk. As a senior member of the Dangkorlo clan, Yalandja is a custodian of the sacred billabong where the mermaid-like yawkyawk spirits reside near his outstation, Barrihdjowkkeng.

“Yawkyawk is my Dreaming,” says Yalandja, who works at Maningrida Arts & Culture on Kunibídji country in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. “I love making these sculptures and I have invented a way to represent the fish scales on her body.”

Meticulously rendered, cascading water droplets play out alongside these shimmering scale effects, which Yalandja represents with the upsidedown v-chevron he developed while also applying the dotting style taught to him by his father, renowned artist Crusoe Kuningbal.

To register interest in Owen Yalandja, please email tobymeagher@michaelreid.com.au

Nganampa Ngura (Our Country)

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Nganampa Ngura (Our Country)

  • Artist
    Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, Emily Cullinan
  • Dates
    11 Jul—10 Aug 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Eora / Sydney

Our winter exhibition program is anchored by an expansive exhibition of new paintings by Emily Cullinan and Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan – mother and daughter artists, both of whom work from Iwantja Arts in the rocky desert country of Indulkana Community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytatjara Lands. Emily Cullinan and Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan are among the leading voices in one of the most dynamic, innovative and celebrated movements in contemporary First Nations painting.

One of the most senior women in her community, Emily Cullinan has been an integral part of the Iwantja art scene for many years and recently experienced a major breakthrough in her practice. Her vibrant paintings are inspired by memories of travelling vast distances on foot across APY Lands with her family.

Nganampa Ngura (Our Country) will have added resonance by placing Emily Cullinan’s work in dialogue with that of her daughter, Hadley’s Art Prize and Ravenswood Art Prize winner Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, whose sublime perspectives of Indulkana Country are conjured via sweeps of deep red crested by rhythmic striations of purple.

All paintings from Nganampa Ngura (Our Country) by Emily Cullinan and Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan and be explored and acquired below. To discuss works from the exhibition with a gallery representative, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Supernatural

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Supernatural

  • Artist
    Tamara Dean
  • Dates
    2 Jul—1 Sep 2024
  • Gallery Location
    Berlin

Supernatural pools a spectacular selection of photographs in the first solo exhibition ever staged in the German capital for leading Australian contemporary artist Tamara Dean.

This survey exhibition has been specially conceived to coincide with Dean’s showing in the world-famous outdoor photography festival, Photo La Gacilly. To celebrate the artist’s exciting career milestone and the expanded presence of her work in Europe, we are thrilled to present two previously unseen images – Sunken Forest and Tickled Pink – both making their world debuts as part of Dean’s Supernatural show.

Together with some of the final remaining editions of Dean’s most popular and acclaimed photographs, these two newly available works have now coalesced in a dazzling display that delights in the enmeshment of natural and human worlds.

All works from Supernatural by Tamara Dean are available to explore and acquire online and will be on view at Michael Reid Berlin until Sunday, 1 September. To request a catalogue and discuss works from the series – including the final remaining editions of Dean’s works Crossing Realms and Passion – please email: colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

 

The Northern Beaches Edit: Volume II

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We are delighted to welcome the second edition of our Michael Reid Sydney x Northern Beaches Edit, presenting significant and spectacular works by some of the stars of our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s stable of represented artists at Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

From a fabulous rosy-toned fantasia from Gerwyn Davies and Troy Emery’s magnificent fringed sculptural fauna to a suite of arresting pictures by leading contemporary artist Petrina Hicks, crashing seascapes by Luke Shadbolt and beachcombed detritus delightfully lensed by Narelle Autio, this dynamic display brings several of Australia’s most acclaimed creative voices to the Northern Beaches for the first time.

Fresh from their showing at Sydney Contemporary 2024, these extraordinary established artists have now arrived at Michael Reid Northern Beaches with dazzling, original, collectable works drawn from the Michael Reid Sydney Collection, all beautifully reflecting the ideas and aesthetic codes that have animated their celebrated practice for decades.

To enquire about works from The Northern Beaches Edit: Volume II, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

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