Everything Might Happen
- Julia Flanagan
- 16 Jan—1 Feb 2026
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, over 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.
Flanagan’s paintings build toward an inward, hard-earned set of motifs: stripes, arches, prisms, crescents and ovals that return like familiar characters, altered slightly each time they appear. Patterned grounds, first imagined as repeat textile designs, become flickering stages over which bands and planes pass, collide, separate, and briefly align.
There is pleasure here, unapologetic yet precise. Colours flare and then quieten; compressed passages open suddenly into air; the eye ranges across the surface and doubles back, catching on small adjustments that register the artist’s decision-making. If the paintings brush lightly against art-historical echoes—Bauhaus textiles, postmodern façades, the optical play of dazzle camouflage—they do so obliquely, without quotation. What remains, above all, is their immediacy: work grounded in lived experience and the daily habits of the studio.
Julia Flanagan has recently been announced the winner of the 2025 Hawkesbury Art Prize, highly commended in the George’s River sculpture prize and a finalist in the 2025 National Emerging Art Prize. She was commissioned to make a series of large scale sculptures for an exhibition in the gardens of the Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea, NSW, titled Many things to Many in 2022. In 2020 she collaborated with Iconic fashion label GORMAN on an extensive collection of clothing adorned with her artwork. The artist has exhibited extensively in galleries in Sydney, Wollongong, Melbourne and Newcastle, and has works in local and international private and institutional collections.
