Sid Pattni

Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and 2025 Archibald Prize finalist Sid Pattni will follow up a banner year with a new succession of projects across the Michael Reid network and beyond – commencing in April with his first large-scale solo exhibition staged across our flagship ground-floor gallery, followed by his Michael Reid Berlin debut.

Born in London and raised in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth, the Indian-Australian artist first approached painting as a way of processing the dissonance of navigating multiple cultural identities. Arriving at an entirely original painterly language, Pattni draws on visual traditions codified and co-opted under empire – from Mughal miniature painting and Indian textiles to British botanical drawings and 19th-century Company Paintings – recasting their compositional logic as symbols of containment and their intricate embellishment as a site of critique.

In his hands, colonial portraiture becomes a lens for exploring diasporic identity and the external projections through which selfhood is constructed. A breakout star of the 2023 National Emerging Art Prize, Pattni joined the Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin stable in the same week he was announced as an Archibald finalist for his self-portrait subtitled The Act of Putting It Back Together, which later lent its name to his tremendously successful Michael Reid Sydney debut.

“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, to ‘symbolise how cultural artefacts were appropriated and recontextualised during empire, and how these reinterpretations continue to influence diasporic self-perception. What feels new … is a deeper emotional intensity.”

To preview and acquire works from Sid Pattni’s forthcoming Eora/Sydney and Berlin exhibitions, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au