We are delighted to announce Clarity After the Storm, a new series of oil paintings by South Coast–based artist Ash Leslie. The works register the changing light that follows a storm, tracing a passage from turbulence to calm.

“This series of work was completed after a long period of stormy weather at the end of winter,” Leslie explains. “As the storm cleared I was taken with the way the sunlight illuminated the landscape in between the patches of passing fog and mist. With hints of spring on the horizon I felt a sense of clarity with the promise of the warm weather to come.”

Ash Leslie’s open-ended process embraces chance and discovery. Layers of oil paint coalesce into forms that hover on the edge of recognition, drifting through diaphanous washes of grey, moss, and blush.

Recognised across Australia, including finalist selections in the Paddington Art Prize, Flow Art Prize, and Signature Art Prize, Leslie has quickly established herself as a singular voice in contemporary abstraction. ‘Clarity After the Storm’ opens this weekend in the Mezzanine Gallery.

Images of the artist courtesy of Jessica Bellef

We are delighted to share with you the inaugural Designers Edit from Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

This private link offers a curated overview of works by both established and emerging artists, spanning a range of mediums, scales, and approaches. Our intention is to provide you with a selection that might inspire – or indeed perfectly complement – your upcoming projects.

If a particular style or artist resonates, please don’t hesitate to be in touch. In many cases we are able to offer additional works from the same artist, and would be pleased to guide you further.

Lucy Vader returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with Weather Report, a major new exhibition extending across both the mezzanine and top floor galleries.

In this latest body of work, the Northern Rivers-based painter deepens her iconoclastic approach to the pastoral tradition. Weather Report gathers landscapes that seem to roil with shifting skies, rain-washed light, and sudden bursts of colour. Fields and paddocks stretch into distance, yet beneath their bucolic calm, Vader coaxes forth surges of painterly energy: skies dissolving into painterly abstraction, horizons blurred in atmospheric veils, unexpected eruptions of yellow, blue, and pink coursing through the scene like weather systems of their own.

“It’s wild and abstract,” Vader explains of her process. “I upset myself and I upset the canvas … I bash things out and then I try and calm it all down again so it becomes a patina of painting moments.” This restless rhythm produces works that hover between figuration and abstraction, their surfaces alive with the turbulence of mark-making.

The exhibition follows on from Vader’s recent celebrated series Exaltation in Sydney and Good Stock at Murrurundi, and confirms her place as one of the most vital painters of the pastoral working in Australia today.

In her debut exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Nicci Bedson paints the fibro cottages, brick veneer homes, motels and apartment blocks that defined the Australian suburban and semi-urban landscape after the Second World War. Rendered in meticulous detail, these buildings -once dismissed as ordinary- are given the halo of artistic attention, elevated as the structures that, for decades, cradled Australian lives.

“For me it’s about the house as architecture, as a marker of a certain time and place in history,” Bedson explains, “but also the house as a vessel for all the memories and lives lived inside.”

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is thrilled to welcome back to the upper level gallery Thirroul/Dharawal artist Anh Nguyen.  Of this new collection of still life and interiors paintings titled Rhymes with Orange, Nguyen says,  “I am thinking of rhymes that are not in sounds or words, and paintings that feel like something such as ‘orange’, a word famously considered to have no perfect rhyme in English. What does orange feel like? Synergies that are unexpected, pairings that are unusual, a mood that is warm, urgent, a state of change.”

“Anh Nguyen will paint anything that she can visually engage with.”, writes Amber Creswell Bell in her profile of the artist for Still Life (Thames & Hudson). “She recalls a quote from another painter, whose name she has long forgotten but whose words have stayed with her: ‘Still life is the thing that is close by, figures and portraits a little farther away, and landscape is in the distance or if you get up and walk a bit, she says. ‘It is all part of the observed world and ready for a curious magpie to eyeball.”

“While Anh will joke that still life is more forgiving than portraiture and more comfortable than plein-air landscape painting, what actually draws her to the genre is that it allows a number of different approaches. ‘It also feels very straightforward, a neutral canvas without pressure to introduce symbolism or narrative, she says.”

extract from Still. Life by Amber Creswell Bell published by Thames & Hudson

Flowers from Kate Vella’s Southern Highlands garden spill across tables scattered with vintage jugs, teacups, fruit and glassware. Each arrangement balances exuberance with intimacy, animated by thick, textured brushstrokes.

Since her 2019 solo debut, Vella has become one of the brightest stars among our regular exhibitors. A recipient of multiple awards – including the 2023 BOCCA Hannah Forbes Memorial Prize – she now returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with Radiance.

Don’t Wish These Days Away by British-born, Sydney-based artist Nicola Woodcock is now open and on-view in the GROUND FLOOR gallery.

In this series, Woodcock focuses on the striking landscapes that edge the Hawkesbury River, drawing on photographs and memories from family weekend trips. Sweeping vistas and intimate still-life studies of native flora speak to crisp winter days, where wattle and banksia punctuate overcast skies with bursts of colour.

Woodcock’s burgeoning affinity for native Australian plant life dates back to her first trip here as a backpacker almost 25 years ago. “A pivotal moment occurred when I encountered a Margaret Preston print gracing the kitchen wall of one of my accommodations,” she says. “The experience left an indelible impression.”

“My pursuit of understanding and venerating Australian natives deepens through meticulously rendering their forms in oil pastel. This medium, demanding rapid execution and minimalistic precision, allows me to encapsulate the essence of the botanical specimens. The objective is to provide an authentic representation – not a pursuit of scientific precision but an endeavour to evoke sentiments of awe, gratitude and comfort.”