This festive season, give something that lasts. The ART of Gift Giving, a selection of original works, all priced under $1,500, brought together for the joy of giving and receiving.

This curated edit features work from artists who exhibit throughout the Michael Reid galleries; Alix Hunter, Angie de Latour, Anh Nguyen, Brittany Jones, Elizabeth Beaumont, Gemma Rose Brook, Julie Purdie, Kate Vella, Leanne Harrison Davies, Lily Platts, Linda Greedy, Miranda Joy Summers, Phoebe Stone and Stacey McCall. Across their varied practices, these fourteen artists offer works that are personal and one of a kind, and that will be treasured long after the wrapping is gone.

Whether you’re buying your first artwork, adding to a collection, or looking for a gift that says more than words can, this is a chance to live with original art and to support the artists who make it.

Browse online or in the gallery seven days a week and find something for someone special, and perhaps keep a piece for yourself.  Please get in touch here if you would like to purchase a GIFT VOUCHER

“The longer I paint, the more I realise there’s a language in what’s unsaid. What lies beneath? What’s the essence? What can be expressed with a singular stroke of paint? These questions are what drive me. They are why I paint, to create a world where this language can exist. It speaks through colour, depth and light – the same themes that shape life itself.”

-Stacey Mramcovksi

Where We Sit, from Naarm/Melbourne based painter Lily Platts sees her return to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with a suite of paintings depicting her perennial muse, the chair. Exploring the incidental compositions she comes across in everyday life, such as: on the side of the road, at garage sales, in op shops and online marketplaces. These everyday objects become the starting point for the work. She explores materiality throughout the series, expanding her practice into ceramics while returning to painting with oils. Working across these materials has brought experimentation and developing new techniques back into her process.

The artist is often asked, ‘Why chairs?’ She has been drawn to the motif for many years, particularly because of the sense of humanity that everyday objects can hold. Chairs can reveal something about the people, places and moments they have been part of, even when we know nothing about their history.
“We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by new things, and where objects can feel easily replaceable and disposable.’

Through these paintings, Platts is interested in slowing
this down and considering the value we place on the objects around us. The works invite us to look again at everyday things and think about the memories, histories and experiences they might hold.

Platts has been a finalist in the 2025 BAMM Biennale Portrait Prize, 2023 National Emerging Art Prize and the Grace Cossington Smith Art Prize. She was a recipient of the 2020 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship after graduating with Honours from RMIT. For priority access, please register your interest.

Ray Monde’s paintings tell a story of queer life in rural Australia, grounded in the landscapes and waterways of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The river, recurring throughout his work, is a place of leisure and freedom, but also of refuge: a landscape through which personal history, belonging and the complexities of country life come into view.

Monde’s distinctive ghost-working technique involves the intricate layering of magazine pages and thin glazes of paint, allowing fragments of printed imagery to persist beneath the painted surface. These traces are integral to the work. Image and obscuration, presence and absence, become means of considering how memory inhabits a place, and how individual lives are recorded, concealed and revealed.

A two-time finalist in both the Blake Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Monde has exhibited widely, with works held in collections in Australia and internationally. His exhibition The Places That Shape Us, presented at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, is now touring.

The historic Rocks district is Eora/Sydney painter Emily Gordon’s most enduring muse: a place that has seized her creative imagination and compelled her to the canvas for years, the last six of which she has spent as a represented artist with Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

In this time, Gordon has cemented her name as one of the most closely followed and widely supported artists in the stable. It is a profile built piece by piece, and brick by sandstone brick, across a growing catalogue of pictures that together form an oeuvre devoted to this glittering city.

The gelato-coloured rooftops, the warm sandstone facades, the arching spine of the Harbour Bridge: these are sights that have long been marvelled at and committed to paint by an important lineage of Australian artists, perhaps most notably Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black.

Like Cossington Smith, it is the distinctive character of Australian light that provides the organising principle of Emily Gordon’s work. Light cuts across the Victorian facades, throwing interesting shapes and shadows; the pale sandstone takes on a burning golden hue, simmering bronze against peach-coloured skies.

Gordon is a master at capturing this light, and in ‘Homecoming’ we see her gift in outstanding form. If these scenes offer more than the pleasure of recognising a certain pub, house or street; if they quicken the senses and cause that little flutter of the heart, it is perhaps because Gordon herself was just as excited to see them again, and to become reacquainted with a place she knows so intimately.

“Homecoming is quite literally the tale of coming home,” she says. “After a two-year hiatus, creating in makeshift workspaces, our family returned to our home in the north end of the Sydney CBD, and I was reunited with my wonderful studio, with its big western window.”

Sydney/Eora-based painter Michael Davis takes street trees as his subject, attending to the forms that line neighbourhoods, occupy public parks and mark the edges of the built environment. He isolates each specimen, observing its peculiar structure and character, and gives it a distinct place within a larger visual order.

In the immense panel works that form Street Choir II, his subjects appear in carefully arranged rows against dark grounds, rendered with a graphic precision that recalls the conventions of botanical illustration. Titles, often wry or oblique, lend these portraits a further measure of individuality. Viewed from a distance, the forms resemble lines of notation in a musical score, their variations gathering into a collective rhythm.

Davis’s woodworking practice extends into the construction and treatment of his frames, which are integral to the works themselves. The pale timber provides a counterpoint to the dark grounds, its surfaces scored and punctured with intricate arrangements of dots. These marks evoke constellations, or the small symbols used to denote trees when seen from above, extending the paintings’ attention to each specimen into another visual register.

Street Choir II is the artist’s second collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

Irene Crowe’s work takes as its subject golden-hour landscapes: clouds, both billowing and feathery, floating above umber horizontal strips of earth. Abstracted to the point of non-specificity, these landscapes hover between the particularity of a remembered view and the suggestive openness of a tonally diffuse image.

The paintings in Nocturne, like those in the artist’s earlier series Prelude, presented at Michael Reid Murrurundi in May this year, draw on views from her former home in Drummoyne, Sydney, overlooking Spectacle and Cockatoo Islands. “The skies overlooking the harbour here are like no other and the light fades in the most dynamic way,” she writes of her companion work, Shelter II, currently showing in the Paddington Art Prize.

Crowe’s honey-hued and apricot skies reflect on the experience of leaving a familiar place, and on how its particularities gradually loosen in memory. “This year, we moved out of our apartment in favour of a larger space. It suddenly dawned on me that I would never experience the beautiful skies and light I had grown so familiar with.”

Painting becomes, in this sense, a form of record-keeping: an attempt to preserve on canvas something that might otherwise fade from memory.

Crowe grew up in a migrant family in which, she recalls, artmaking was not considered a viable career. She went on to study legal history and culture at university, but continued to draw and attend painting classes, gradually finding her way towards the medium that had once intimidated her.

“In my early years, I sketched with felt-tip and pencil, mostly buildings and landscapes (in small format), capturing all the awe-inspiring places that I had travelled to. I had also attended painting classes held by other artists (like Sally Ryan, Lorraine Loots and Claudia Rilling) as I was eager to learn; however, I was always intimidated by the medium of paint, by the precision of colour mixing and how unforgiving it can be sometimes. My experiences being around other creatives inspired me to experiment. So one day, I decided to work more fluidly with paint over a large canvas and it was incredible. The act of layering over the canvas became a personal unburdening where each mark unleashed both difficult and healthy emotions, balancing each other, giving equal weight and permission to occupy the same space.”