Michael Reid Southern Highlands is honoured to present Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku – Keeping Stories Strong, an expansive exhibition bringing together three leading painters from Iwantja Arts, the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre at Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Presenting extraordinary new works by Maringka Burton, Emily Cullinan and Raylene Walatinna, the exhibition celebrates three of the most exciting and accomplished creative voices within the exuberant movement in First Nations painting that has flourished at Iwantja and brought its artists global acclaim.

“Iwantja is an engine room of Australian art – a small desert community producing work of national consequence. Some art centres follow the market; Iwantja drives it,” writes our galleries’ chairman and director, Michael Reid OAM. “Walatinna, Cullinan and Burton paint with the boldness that has made Iwantja one of the most watched and collected art making communities in the country. You don’t need to know anything about collecting First Nations art to feel that. The colour, the wit, the sheer confidence of these paintings speak for themselves.” Now available to preview by request ahead of next week’s opening, Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku arrives at a moment of renewed national attention for Iwantja artists, coinciding with the National Gallery of Australia’s landmark exhibition Ngura Puḻka – Epic Country, where Walatinna and Burton are both represented.

“The energy of an art centre is hard to describe,” writes curator Hannah Presley in the introduction to the widely celebrated 2022 publication IWANTJA, which devotes extensive chapters to each of the three artists featured in Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku. “They buzz with the unexpected activity of an art studio, but there is also another layer to these spaces as sites of cultural continuation. Art making is one of the ways our Elders have shared cultural stories that have informed generations of painters, and art has been a useful tool for reinforcing a strong sense of identity and belonging.” That spirit of cultural continuity is felt throughout Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku, whose title speaks directly to the enduring responsibility of keeping Tjukurpa – the ancestral stories, knowledge systems and cultural foundations that connect Aṉangu people to Country – strong across generations.

Among the exhibition’s three artists, Emily Cullinan stands as one of Iwantja’s most senior painters, with her vibrant, rhythmically animated canvases drawing on childhood memories of travelling vast distances across the APY Lands with her family while living according to Aṉangu tradition. “We have really good memories from those days,” says Cullinan, a name visitors to Michael Reid Southern Highlands will know from a succession of warmly received group showings at our Berrima gallery.

Raylene Walatinna has developed a distinctive visual language that honours Country while extending a remarkable artistic lineage. She is the daughter and frequent collaborator of acclaimed artist, Iwantja director and, as of this year, four-time Wynne Prize finalist Betty Chimney, and through their collaborative practice, the two artists continue the custom of older women passing cultural knowledge to younger generations. “My mum has always been my closest friend. I learnt how to paint from her,” says Walatinna. “Over time, I’ve developed my own way of working too.” The artists’ monumental 2022 painting Nganampa Ngura – Our Country is now soaring almost three metres above the NGA exhibition space as a spectacular centrepiece of the long-awaited, artist-led Ngura Puḻka exhibition and also features prominently in the NGA’s accompanying publication.

Completing the trio of Iwantja talents joining forces for Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku is revered Pitjantjatjara artist and ngangkari (traditional healer) Maringka Burton, who is also represented in the NGA show with a sprawling work she co-created with her friend, fellow Iwantja artist and frequent collaborator Betty Muffler. “We get on really well in all our work, both as ngangkari and now, when we are working on our paintings together,” says Burton, whose luminous compositions are informed by healing, memory and her enduring connection to her mother’s Country. “Betty and I, we go on spiritual journeys called marali, our spirits going to heal. We go at night to give treatments to the sick and we come back to ourselves.”

While distinct in their painterly approaches and perspectives, Burton, Cullinan and Walatinna are united by a shared commitment to carrying Tjukurpa forward through painting. Their works reveal the extraordinary vitality of a living cultural tradition in which memory, knowledge and responsibility are passed from one generation to the next. At a moment of historic national attention for the artists of Iwantja and the wider APY Lands, Michael Reid Southern Highlands is proud to bring these three leading artists together in Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku – Keeping Stories Strong.

Mountain Made is a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Louise Frith, returning the Eora/Sydney-based artist to the Southern Highlands with some of the most immersive works of her career to date. Building on the creative breakthrough of her celebrated Murrurundi exhibitions Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries, along with her debut collection at Michael Reid Sydney last year, Frith’s latest paintings delve deep into the bushland surrounding Pierce’s Pass in Blue Mountains National Park. Sketching in the field before returning to the studio, the artist closely observes the dense floral interplay of the landscape, its tangled undergrowth and resilient plant life emerging through sandstone cracks and beneath the canopy.

Moving with painterly gusto between passages of intricate, tightly controlled detail and moments of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and grow to the very edge of the canvas. “Most people are enthralled by the big views, looking down the valleys, marvelling at the escarpment,” says the artist, “but I’m charmed by the details at my feet.” 

The works in Mountain Made are deeply informed by the cycles of destruction and regeneration that shape the Australian landscape. Pierce’s Pass was severely affected by the 2020 bushfires, and Frith recalls how visitors spoke of an eerie silence after the burn, a landscape emptied of birdsong and the usual din of the ecosystem. Returning in recent summers, however, she found the terrain transformed once more: “If you visit now, the landscape is thriving and the thrum of cicadas is deafening. It is full of life again,” says the artist. In this respect, the exhibition becomes a meditation on regrowth and renewal, celebrating the resilience and restorative power of the Australian bush within one of the country’s most sublime landscapes.

The rugged countryside of Tasmania’s north-west coast finds eloquent expression in Brooke Van Ruiswyk’s A Place of Belonging, her debut exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

It is a landscape of rolling hills, sodden paddocks and heavy skies, dotted with wind-pruned macrocarpa and traced by shelter belts. This is the country in which Van Ruiswyk, and generations of her family before her, have lived and worked.

Drawing upon photographs and field observations, Van Ruiswyk returns to the studio and reconstructs her scenes with oils. There is a natural affinity between the medium and the world it describes: the dewiness of oil paint echoes the moisture-laden atmosphere of the landscape itself. Thick passages of paint lend weight and solidity to the hills, while more delicate applications capture the drifting mists and lingering fog.

Across the exhibition, the eye is repeatedly drawn upward to immense sheets of cloud. At times they are feathery; at others they loom low over the countryside, carrying the promise of rain. Van Ruiswyk grants equal weight to the physical grandeur of the terrain and these vast, granite-grey, skies. They are, in her words, “a central emotional presence” in the work.

In 2024, Van Ruiswyk received the People’s Choice Award in the Henry Jones Art Prize. Her work has also been recognised through three selections in the Glover Prize – one of Australia’s most prestigious awards for landscape painting – as well as finalist honours in the Lethbridge 20,000 Award in both 2022 and 2023.

The story behind this exhibition is a positive one — a shaft of sunlight cutting through the noise and shadow of world events that can seem beyond our control. Back From The Brink is a reminder that, with enough goodwill, good science, and community effort, we can pull back from the edge — and that this is worth celebrating.

Fiona Smith’s paintings honour the work of conservationists and communities who have fought to rescue bird species from extinction. She is painting birds that almost weren’t here.

Every species in this exhibition was, at some point, heading towards oblivion — reduced to dozens of individuals, their habitats destroyed, their futures a ticking timebomb. But thanks to the global conservation movement, here they are: surviving, sometimes thriving, and depicted among a fiesta of flowers.

Among them, Brazil’s Lear’s Macaw — that vivid blue jewel of the caatinga cliff faces — was down to just 60 individuals in the early 1980s. Today, there are more than 2,500. The majestic Trumpeter Swan, hunted almost to extinction across North America, now fills the skies of the great northern wetlands in its thousands. In New Zealand, whole islands have been cleared of introduced predators so that birds found nowhere else on Earth have somewhere safe to raise their young.

Since 2000, 25 bird species have stepped back from the Critically Endangered list. Of course, this is a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing loss of species worldwide — but what these stories deliver is proof of something vital: that humans have the ability to repair some of the damage we have caused. That we are better off saving this planet — the only one we have — than ditching it to hitch a ride on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketship to Mars.

This collection is determinedly joyful and playful. It focuses on beauty and wonder. Each painting carries a name that translates as “hope” in a different language.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965). Carson, a marine biologist and naturalist, is best known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the devastating environmental effects of pesticide use — particularly DDT — on birds and ecosystems, and helped ignite the modern conservation movement.

Showing this month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Placeheld gathers ten painters working within the landscape, each bringing a distinct sensibility to the question of place. Together, the exhibition offers a timely survey of some of the most compelling voices shaping landscape painting in Australia today. Placeheld features new work by Anh Nguyen, Anthea Stead, Cate Maddy, Kate Vella, Libby Wakefield, Meg Walters, Sam Wilkinson, Suzie Riley, Tara Price and Zoe Grey.

Anh Nguyen’s Offcuts brings together a suite of small-scale paintings that turn a close, attentive eye to what is nearest at hand. Working across still life and interiors, Nguyen begins, as she notes, “with what might otherwise be discarded: offcuts, leftover marks, fleeting glimpses.” A vase of freesias loosens into gesture; a figure half-held within a thicket of green; a child bent over a page, absorbed; a beach or roadside scene glimpsed in passing -each work feels caught mid-thought, as if the image has only just arrived and might just as easily dissolve again.

In After the Flood, Eora/Sydney-based artist, Drew Truslove turns his attention again to the Minnamurra River and its surrounding bushland, tracing the tangled beauty and abundance of this river country.

Working with a single colour—a luminous, mineral blue – Truslove’s landscape are drawn in near-continuous fields of marks, looping, searching and restless. His line doubles back, thickens and disperses, at times so fine it seems to hover just above the canvas, then gathering weight along the spine of a trunk, or in the articulation of roots gripping the bank. Ink proves uniquely suited to this task. It follows the slip of a hand without resistance, registering each pause and surge of confidence. 

The effect is of a landscape in the process of assembling itself: the river country as a shifting tangle of elements and relations, continually being rewritten.

In After the Flood, Truslove observes the Minnamurra River after a period of inundation. Flooded banks have been reshaped, trees displaced and channels re-routed. There is an underlying awareness of force, of what the river is capable of when it exceeds its usual bounds. “I was curious about how the pieces would turn out.” says the artist. “Would they be paintings of destruction and mess or would they show something else. In the end the scenes I focused on show both damage and growth in harmony together.”

Earlier attentions to lightly marked fox paths—seen in Truslove’s first collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands (Fox Paths – Minnamurra River, December 2024 to Feb 2025) —finds an echo in these reworked grounds. Here, however, traces of movement are more forcefully inscribed. The introduction of diptychs extends this thinking outward: the seam between panels becomes another line within the work, a hinge across which the landscape unfolds.

“The diptychs have allowed me to explore larger, more dramatic representations of this landscape.” says the artist. “I’ve been slowly escalating the size of these pieces in recent years to try and replicate the intensity, scale and immersive nature of the scenes. It’s allowed me to play around with composition in a different way, looking at scenes that ‘work’ individually and combined.”

What Drew Truslove ultimately proposes is a different way of seeing landscape. In choosing ink as the final medium, he makes a decisive claim: that a line and a single colour – drawn with clarity, patience, and an acute responsiveness to the world – can hold the vastness, force, and subtlety of a landscape.

Named Runner-Up in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, and recipient of the Award of Excellence in the Morgans Financial Prize for an Emerging Painter for ‘Flat Rock, River Crossing, 7th Angle’, Truslove is an artist of growing stature. After the Flood is his third solo collection with Michael Reid – with his prior two collections selling out in their entirety.

To speak with a Michael Reid representative about Drew Truslove’s work, press the Register Interest tile.

Winner of the Henry Jones Art Prize for 2025, Zoë Fitzherbert paints abstract landscapes that carry reflections of place, atmosphere and memory. Her layered compositions trace the changing weather, colour and contours that shape how a landscape is felt and remembered, rather than seen. 

A former architect, Zoë’s practice brings together instinct and precision: swathes of shifting, emotive colour layered with fine, map-like linework inspired by the cartographic conventions of her great-grandfather. 

Raised in the misted hills of the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Zoë now paints from her studio overlooking nipaluna/Hobart.

“Driving home from Cradle Mountain in late spring, my route twisted down the steep slopes in a wash of colour.  Shockingly beautiful glimpses of the ranges came and went, receding in crags of blue and brown;  the foreground held a deep, inky green.  Even the sky felt full of colour.

Back in the studio, I started sketching and mixing from memory, guided only by the impressions that remained.  Cethana I and Cethana II are the result of this journey.

Alongside these works, I developed a large autumnal diptych, capturing the view from my studio.  When the Air Turns reflects a landscape I am fortunate to encounter daily, and yet it is never the same.  At this time of year, looking out over the hills, I can smell the seasonal shift in the air before I even step outside.  There is a melancholy beauty to this season;  a quiet stirring that revives memories of all autumns that have come before.”

‘Further Downstream’ is a new body of work by Albury-based painter Edwina Edwards—her first exhibition with Michael Reid in more than four years.

The collection was formed following time spent at Wendy McDonald’s Glencoe Farm, around Thule Lagoon, and in the wetlands of Murray Valley National Park. This is not a landscape of ascent or outlook, but of spread: reedbeds, flooded edges, low grasses and distant treelines held in long horizontal passages.

Edwards understands that this country is best caught obliquely. Rather than fixing a single view, she lets the image gather through accumulations of marks—blue canopies pressed against pale skies, mauves and pinks breaking across the scrub line, water opening in cool bands through the foreground.

“Though geographically distinct from my daily surroundings, this landscape is not separate from it,” says the artist. “The Murray River forms a living thread between my home in the Albury hills and these downstream wetlands. Water carries stories, sediments, and memory. In moving downstream, I am not leaving my own landscape behind, but tracing its extension—following its flow into broader, quieter country.”