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, and weatherboard cottages 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.”

This September, Michael Reid Southern Highlands presents a commanding showcase of leading female painters from the Iwantja Arts Community – the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre in the rocky desert country of Indulkana, on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands of South Australia.

“Painting … is a teaching tool,” says Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, director and cultural liaison officer of Iwantja Arts, and a featured artist in ‘Ngura pilunpa – Peaceful Country’. “We use our paintings as a way of sharing stories, Country and Tjukurpa (ancestral creation stories), as well as what it was like here in the old days — like the mission times when people were living and working at the stations.”

Established nearly fifty years ago as a modest communal printmaking facility, Iwantja Arts has, through the vision of its founding directors, evolved into one of the most dynamic and respected centres of contemporary art in Australia, with an influence reaching far beyond its desert home.

Ngura pilunpa- Peaceful Country brings together works by Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, Emily Cullinan, Raylene Walatinna, Betty King, Priscilla Singer, Maringka Burton, Trisha Singer, Sallyanne Robert, Rosalind Tjanyari and Daisy Barney.

Each artist, with her distinct visual language, paints a single Tjukurpa – a cultural story rooted in her Country. Barney captures the lush vibrancy of the Kapata (bush plum) plant; Cullinan evokes the waterholes, boulders and riverbeds once traversed with her family on long journeys across Country. Burton, painting her ancestral lands of Anamara Piti – the site of the Caterpillar Tjukurpa, near Irrunytju (Wingellina) – uses sweeping brushwork to map roads and waterholes in bold, fluid lines.