Twenty five years ago, heralding a new and fresh direction in Aboriginal painting, 20 artists from Ampilatwatja held their first sell-out exhibition.  Ampilatwatja (pronounced um-blood a-watch) sits on Alyawarr land, stretching north east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), it is here that the artists map out the lands to reveal the contents of their country.

By 2003 the art centre was incorporated and the community were producing artwork reflecting life experience and bringing culture alive.  The beauty of the Artists of Ampilatwatja artwork emerges from a close association with the land, passed down through generations. The Artists of Ampilatwatja have painted together for 25 years. ‘Our painting has no borders, just one country. Ampilatwatja is our place, Ampilatwatja is our country’.  Elizabeth Ngwarraye Bonne

Archibald finalist Evan Shipard will make his exhibition debut with Michael Reid with a new body of Southern Highlands landscapes, centred on Berrima and its surrounds. These paintings grow out of repeated walks and return visits: river bends that hold the light, poplars standing like sentinels, low hills that lift and fall in slow rhythms. Shipard works between the studio and the open air, chasing the fugitive moments that remake a place — the pearl-grey hush of dawn, the heat-drained tones of late afternoon, the mirrored stillness of water at dusk. Classically trained and deeply attentive to atmosphere, he brings a rare tenderness to these scenes.

Gunning, NSW is a place of enduring personal significance for Emily Gordon. She has travelled here with her family for many years, returning again and again to this gorgeous landscape.  Across this small suite of works, Gordon charts the paddocks, tree lines, winding roads and bodies of water around Gunning with the same acuity she brings to urban facades. Eucalypts rise pale and rhythmic against broad skies; roads curve gently through dry grasslands; reflections double the world in still pools.

What links Quieter Ground to Gordon’s cityscapes is her enduring commitment to Australian light as a structuring force.  In Paddington and The Rocks, light falls across architectural planes—staircases, rooftops, terraces stepping downhill. Here, light behaves differently. It is ecological and spatial: moving laterally through sky, repeating across tree trunks. Ochres, golds and muted greens replace the gelato tones of the city, yet Gordon’s palette remains alert and finely calibrated.

A sustained intimacy with the landscape is felt throughout Quieter Ground. Scale plays an important role. Working on an intimate register allows Gordon to distil each composition to its essentials. If Paddington Stories emerged from sustained urban wandering, Quieter Ground feels anchored in stillness and return: a body of work attentive to the slower disclosures of a place known over time.  Quieter Ground ultimately affirms Emily Gordon as a painter of place in the fullest sense—equally attuned to the city’s charged complexity and to the restrained, durational poetry of the regional landscape.

Julia Flanagan’s debut exhibition with Michael Reid unfolds in vivid, jubilant cadences of colour, pattern and form, and reveals an artist working at full stretch within a language she has made her own. The paintings seem animated by the same rhythm: lines curve, return and cross themselves, slipping between foreground and background as though intent on binding the works together. Many begin as drawings – quick, provisional notations made at a domestic table or studio bench – before widening into fields of paint. From there, fragments are enlarged, spliced, rephrased; a sliver from an earlier canvas becomes the seed of the next. Quilting squares, remembered from her mother’s sewing, offer geometric ballast, though that order is soon unsettled by curves and arcs that dip and weave like the thread pulled through cloth. The result is a choreography of parts – disciplined, but never still.

It is our great pleasure to welcome Dharawal multi-disciplinary artist Amy Cuneo to our top floor gallery this coming January. Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives including familiar objects, flowers and tender depictions of domestic scenes.

For her collection Spread  Cuneo says “These paintings have taken their form while considering how we spread our attention, affection and energy in everyday life. Domestic demands as a caregiver continue but within these parameters I have scope to play, imagine and enjoy. These works are an invitation to attend the lives we have in front of us- colour filled and complex.”  

Cuneo has shown widely in NSW and Tasmania and has been a finalist in several art prizes including FLOW (2019/2023) and the Fisher’s Ghost (2023). Her work is included in various private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and has been collected by Tiers & Co Collecting Group

Out of the Blue is a mini-suite of oil paintings emerging from a practice concerned, in essence, with the condition of being human. These works – forming Armelle Swan’s debut with the gallery – aim to characterise, in poetic and intuitive terms, some of the most charged human experiences — grief among them.

Across the suite, notions of presence and absence recur. In still life the figure is typically absent, yet it may reappear by proxy: a cup, jug or bottle operating as a kind of cipher for the human in the story.

Each work here centres on a vessel — cups, a vase, a jug, a bowl — a motif that since antiquity has carried metaphorical weight, touching on ideas of literal and figurative containment and the human impulse to keep or hold.

Two works, ‘Not in the Picture’ and ‘Revealed’, feature vessels decorated in blue and white motifs traditionally associated with funerals, death and mourning in Chinese culture. This symbolism sits in neat alignment with still life’s historical relationship to mortality, and with the larger theme of grief within the suite. These elements became newly compelling in Swan’s practice following two life-altering experiences: the recent arrival of a daughter-in-law of Chinese ancestry, and, some years earlier, the death of her own daughter — a loss that precipitated a long and brutal journey of grief. In these paintings, the cultural and the deeply personal converge.

‘Kitchen Sill (after Hopper)’ may appear, at first glance, to depict a simple domestic interior, yet its composition carries a more philosophical charge. The velvety darkness outside, the bright white sill, and the pendant lights reflected in the glass recall the haunting sensibility of Edward Hopper’s Automat. The window becomes a threshold: a meeting point of dark and light. The reflected lights appear to move from the interior into the night, piercing both the window pane and the picture plane as they recede like a row of distant streetlamps. As ever, the window is an ‘eye’ that sees, and the view it frames echoes the act of painting itself.

‘Glow’ offers an interior heightened by a keen register of attention — a meditation on observation and presence.

Armelle Swan has exhibited in group and solo shows, completed numerous portrait commissions, and been a finalist in several awards, including the Waverley 9 x 5” (twice), the Kings School Art Prize, the Harden Landscape Prize, and various portraiture and still life prizes. Highlights include curated exhibitions such as ACB Selects (2023), The Making Effect for the Arts Health Association NSW (2020), and Dot, dot, dot… (2017) at Sydney College of the Arts Galleries.

In 2019 she undertook a study tour of Italy with Dr Julie Fragar, and in 2023 completed a major arts–health commission for SPHERE Knowledge Translation, creating works based on her interpretation of academic health-study findings. Her works are represented in private collections in Australia, South Africa, the UK, Dubai and Singapore, and in public collections including the Young Endeavour Youth Scheme, the Archdiocese of Hobart and the Black Dog Institute.

Opening this December, Botanica Vita II assembles nine artists who return, again and again, to the natural world — to the flowers, branches and unruly greens that anchor their sense of place. For each, the botanical is less a subject than a lens: a way of noticing, of keeping time, of understanding how the living world impresses itself on the mind.

Several familiar voices reappear here — India Mark, Louise Anders, Angie de Latour, Susan Morris, Miranda Summers, Nadja Kabriel and Baden Croft — their works forming a kind of ongoing conversation across years and exhibitions. They are joined, for the first time, by Allie Webb and Alice Laura Palmer, whose paintings bring a fresh tempo to the still-life tradition, alert to subtle shifts in colour, light and structure.

Across the collection, the works share an understanding that the botanical is never static. Light shifts, colour gathers and recedes, compositions tighten and loosen. A single stem can hold a surprising amount of intent; a vase can become an anchor point for an entire scene.

Botanica Vita II asks viewers to consider why these forms endure — why flowers, branches and arranged objects continue to offer artists a way into deeper observation.

Working in a bold, expressive impasto, David King charts roads, ridgelines and shifting weather with an almost operatic instinct for drama: sky pressing low over the hills, light pooling in unexpected places, fences and telegraph lines drawing the eye forward. The scenes he paints travel widely — the Illawarra escarpment, the Central Tablelands, the edges of Goulburn, Orford’s pale fields, the misted greens of Ireland — but his subject is not geography. “I see the same things everywhere,” he says. “Ireland, Tasmania, the Tablelands — fences, gates, telegraph poles. They join all these places.”