Shaped by Weather is the first exhibition at Michael Reid Southern Highlands by Anita Phillips, bringing together landscapes from the iron-red expanses of the Pilbara and the rolling hills of Tasmania. Across these markedly different places, Phillips adjusts her palette and descriptive language. The collection records a shift in perspective: a gradual tilting of the landscape towards the viewer, from the distant horizons of WA to the broad, inscribed foregrounds of Tasmania.

In the Pilbara paintings, the landscape is mostly compressed into a thin rust-red band, sometimes occupying little more than a fraction of the canvas. Trees are lightly defined by dashes and dabs of paint, slight apostrophes against a pale horizon, while enormous expanses of sky open above them. In works such as Here, The Blue and Shaped by Weather, the effect is panoramic: the horizon runs in a nearly unbroken lateral line through the painting and seems to continue beyond its edges.

It is here that Fred Williams comes to mind, particularly his remarkable ability to find monumentality in the Australian landscape through a spare vocabulary of marks and dashes. Phillips shares something of this economy. Yet in these works, reduction is also a matter of perspective. By lowering the horizon and withholding the foreground, she places the landscape at a distance. We look out across it rather than into it; the enormity of the place is registered in the disproportion between that slender strip of earth and the atmosphere above.

In the Tasmanian paintings, that relationship is overturned. Sky relinquishes much of the canvas to fields, grasses and sloping terrain. In Drifting Blue, a long, slender horizontal view near Richmond sets the ordered expanse of agricultural land against the hills beyond: terrain that, despite the geometry imposed upon it, remains beyond the farmers’ control. It is this tension between cultivation and wildness that gives the Tasmanian paintings their particular charge. And above it all is the weather, continually altering the character of the land beneath it.

In If You Wait Long Enough and As It Should Be, the foreground extends almost to meet us. Broad expanses of ochre and muted gold push from the lower edge of the painting towards hills softened by rain and mist.

Across these foregrounds, paint is accumulated, scraped back and scored into. Among these marks appear fragments of written language, drawn from the journals Phillips keeps as she travels and works: observations, recollections and partial phrases inscribed into the painted surface. Some can be read; others disappear into the surrounding marks.

Phillips has exhibited widely across Western Australia and interstate, and has undertaken painting residencies and field research in Tasmania, Central Australia, the Pilbara, Scotland and Cornwall. In 2025 she was awarded the Cossack Art Prize Overall Winner and was a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize.

The paintings gathered in Poetry Within—an exhibition presented across Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Michael Reid Southern Highlands over July—reveal two complementary strands within Dalin Alejandrino’s practice.

At Newport, she turns towards the brightness of the coast. Blues, sea greens and pale washes of colour open the surface to light. In Berrima, the palette is swept into ochres, charcoal and muted greens, giving the work an earthbound presence. Seen together, the two exhibitions reveal an artist with a finely developed feel for the emotional possibilities of abstraction.

Alejandrino paints intuitively. Layers of acrylic and oil stick accumulate over the course of a studio session, moving between broad gestural flourishes and moments of close, staccato brushwork. Each mark responds to the last, so that a painting becomes a record of its own making rather than the pursuit of a predetermined image.

A horizon line, the edge of a ridge, light across water or a weather cell are suggested—obliquely—but never directly or literally described. “The environment and emotion are deeply tied for me,” she says. “There’s something in the act of layering that feels like uncovering both.”

A finalist in the 2024 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Alejandrino names Monet and Turner among her earliest influences. She returns to them for their handling of light—for the way atmosphere—a weeping sky, or a cloak of mist on the waterfront—can be worked into paint itself. For these masters, light was the organising force of their work, shaping its entire emotional tenor as surely as it carved and defined a cliffface.

Painting first became important to Alejandrino as a teenager. “Art was the visual language I could be expressive in,” she recalls. Growing up in a Khmer-Australian family in south-west Sydney, where her parents rebuilt their lives after arriving in Australia as refugees, she set those ambitions aside in favour of a more conventional career. She returned to painting after the birth of her daughter. “Painting was precious time to myself.” The simplicity of that remark is telling. The studio became a place where the demands of everyday life gave way to quiet—a whirring mind and a working brush.

Poetry Within marks Alejandrino’s first solo exhibition with Michael Reid, following her inclusion in the major group exhibition Quiet Tide at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2025.

To journey into Miranda Joy Summers’ home studio is to walk the winding halls and stairs of her rambling Victoria terrace – a gem of its time – edged with filigreed wrought iron lattice work that, in the late afternoon sun, throws a shadow of the design against the master bedroom, which, in fact, sleeps a giant easel and sprawling studio set up.

It is here that Miranda has dreamt up and committed to paint the work that forms Threshold – the artist’s third solo collection with Michael Reid – after an acclaimed run of collections in 2025 and early 2026, beginning with The Sound of Phthalo in the Southern Highlands, continuing with Rock Tree Flow in the Northern Beaches, and now culminating in this much-anticipated return to Berrima.

The Middle Harbour inlet is Miranda’s constant muse – observed by foot and by boat – a place of refuge, calm and, creatively speaking, an unending source of inspiration, as though she returns there by magnetic charge.

Often wielding a camera on her excursions, the artist will photograph what she sees, busily seeking out a quiet notch or well-balanced scene of moored boats bobbing on the calm waters, sending gentle ripples and distorting their own glassy reflections, or the dense bushland that clings to the harbourside, shooting up from rockfaces in deep green thickets.

It is the surface tricks of water that is one of the artist’s great pictorial fascinations – how they can be convincingly replicated with luscious, heaped oil paint, and how the idea of a perfect representation being ‘loosened’, made fluid, as we see in reflected forms in the water, has its exact parallel with oil impasto – the performance of this paint, which must necessarily distil exact forms to a matter of shapes and gestures.

The unique qualities of oil paint are deployed with magnificent effect across this suite, where each painting appears to radiate with the particular hour of day that is being depicted. We find certain works which flare with a golden hue, suggesting the breaking light of dawn or that last feeble hour of sunset, others in the crisp and saturating light of a high Australian noon.

“I prefer it when my source images are a little blurry,” she tells me on a walk along the harbour, passing charming wooden sailing clubs that cling to oyster-covered rocks and flanked by anchored boats with irreverent painted names. By having her reference images blurry, they are prepared for the kind of stylistic abbreviations and formal reductions that she will later achieve with oils on canvas.

On this day, the harbour was a show of light and colour, sparkling before us beneath a near cloudless mid-winter sky.

It is clear to see how this sublime part of Sydney has been so transformative for this emerging painter – a veritable magic show that occurs on repeat – from which she must put herself in the long service of discovering its tricks.

Returning to her studio, Summers studies and manipulates her images, drawing over them with an iPad and playing with light and shadow.

“Then I return to the site, revisit the atmosphere, take more photos and refine the emerging idea,” she says. “It’s a layered process of memory, observation and re-immersion. The final work is grounded in reality, but distilled through repeated looking, sensing and imagining.”

It often feels that the imaginative potential of the harbour-side is only hemmed in by the simple fact of the dimension of her canvas – and even then, peaks and curls of impasto pigment hang off their outer edges, suggesting a scene still forming, and the canvas as a sculpted art object.

Indeed, the limits of the canvas are stretched further with Weightless and Buttery, pictures which, across two panels each, link seamlessly together such that they form a sweeping and breathtaking view, pieced together like a composite image.

With a knife, she trowels the paint in thick passages around the bushland and the waterfront homes that crane their necks out from the trees, before smoothing to an extremely fine treatment for her diaphanous skies and water.

Harnessing the full technical possibilities of oil paint – to accumulate into thick peaks and crests, or flatten into almost nothing – Miranda handles her brush with extraordinary technical virtuosity.

Threshold opens on July 30 and will be celebrated with an opening reception on August 15. To register your interest in an advance catalogue, or to arrange a private viewing appointment of these works, please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au

With Soliloquy, Brisbane-based oil painter Conor Knight makes his return to Michael Reid after nearly two years, presenting a suite of works across our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands spaces throughout June and July.

Knight depicts his floral subjects as boldly illuminated and set against spare grounds, such that the force of our attention rests on the elegance with which these still-life forms are depicted: the curve of a leaf, or the delicacy of a petal.

In this lighting, his subjects are endowed with an almost actorly grace, as though stage-lit and moments away from delivering a great monologue. “In theatre, a soliloquy is a window into the inner thoughts of a character,” says Knight. “These still life paintings use that concept to create works that touch on themes of intimacy, theatricality and solitude. Borrowing their titles from famous monologues and soliloquies, the collection explores feelings that sit between softness and unease.”

Always, there is attention to the gradations of tone changing across his forms as they turn towards and away from their light sources. The control of his brush, allowing it to deposit just enough paint to successfully record a form and then nothing more, gives each work a buoyancy and lightness.

On this level, he recalls one contemporary Australian master, Robert Malherbe. Further back, one can see that the artist is an eager student of history, with a deep respect for the traditions of Dutch and Flemish vanitas painting, albeit in a more gestural register and one less constrained by the pursuit of exact fidelity.

Also coursing through his work is a care for his medium which begins at its earliest stages, mulling his paints himself so that he has the most precise control possible over their viscosity and performance on the canvas. “I’ve really come to appreciate the unique quality of oil as the binding agent in paint,” Knight says. “Oil is able to hold light within. When light hits the surface of an oil painting, some of that light passes through the paint and reflects within the oil.”

In a stylistic flourish, Knight allows elements of the grisaille underpainting to poke through: a nod to the process itself, whereby a stable orange ground becomes the starting point and base colour upon which all others are applied. It is also very much an active element within the final composition, giving the work an almost weathered quality – as though uncovered after centuries.

If his botanical forms can be considered stars of the stage, characters of such devotion singing their arias, then concluding on the cuts of meat must be an undeniable and wry gesture: after the beauty, the meat of the scene, or its substance. Of course, by including the subject, Conor tells us that there is some underappreciated beauty in this subject too.

“My recent body of work is an exploration of scopophilia—an Ancient Greek term translating to the love of looking, or the aesthetic gratification derived from deep observation. While the word often carries psychological or sensual connotations, I find it perfectly captures the quiet, driving obsession at the heart of still life painting.”

Mirra Whale is a Sydney-based artist who has, over a matter of decades, established herself as one of the most beloved and admired still life painters and portraitists working in Australia.

A five-time Archibald finalist, Whale was recently the subject of an expansive survey exhibition at the Ngununggula regional art gallery, Scenes and Silence—a career milestone which, for the first time, saw key examples from the artist’s career positioned in conversation with each other, drawn from private collections across the country.

It was at Ngununggula that the widest arc of Whale’s practice—and her studied devotion to simple scenes, populated by utilitarian vessels and clipped botanicals—became clearer than ever. Hers is an artist’s life devoted to the beauty and staying power of those items and arrangements around us; our pursuit of grace in the domestic interior.

“The subjects of these paintings are intentionally intimate, drawn entirely from the immediate sanctuary of my home and studio. There is no manufactured grandeur here; instead, I find beauty in the overlooked and the familiar. Flowers are gathered from kerbside foraging, fruit rests on my kitchen counter, and cherished objects have travelled alongside me for decades, carrying the invisible weight of memory and time.”

Whale, in life as in art, remains deeply humble, and her practice is a private devotion to form and technique.

When Scenes and Silence was presented alongside an important travelling collection by Clarice Beckett from the National Gallery of Australia, the resonance between these painters was immediately felt. Between them, a serious and disciplined search for beauty—enthral to its force, and the sheer joy of a well-done surface.

“To truly look at an object is an act of pure pleasure,” she says. “The deliberate interplay of light and shadow, the geometry of form, and the texture of a surface are not merely subjects to be recorded; they are the very essence of seeing. Through these paintings, I want to reclaim the act of looking as a form of slow, meditative joy.”

Whale’s studio is a bustling, frenzied space of work and study, tubes and ornamented bowls jostling for space, and a shelf which is, in the Margaret Preston sense, her ‘laboratory’, around which her forms are arranged and tested.

A clear hallmark of a Mirra Whale painting is the tabletop, seen from the slightly elevated or directly side-profile view, atop which tablecloths are left to bunch, crease and drape, ostensibly ‘scoring’ the scene, or setting a kind of soft, geometric grid, almost like the lines of sheet music, and her vessels, the written notes.

It’s this fundamental order and balance that grounds the work, gives it solidity and firmness—and, when actually viewed together, it is as though Mirra is painting on a table that extends for miles; a table that stretches beyond the frame, and has provided the scaffold for her work throughout her career.

Sacred in the Ordinary is, as Mirra writes, “an invitation to slow, to step into my studio, and to share in the profound, instinctual pleasure of simply looking.” It is an invitation we accept in a heartbeat.

Elizabeth Beaumont’s studio is an iron shed nestled amongst the undulating hills of the Southern Highlands, the landscape she calls home. From the outside, it could easily be mistaken for a machinery shed. Within lies a world of restless experimentation: worn books with softened spines; illustrated field guides to Australian native botanicals—including a volume devoted entirely to the acacias of New South Wales in a vivid yellow cover; shelves of pigments; improvised palettes; and canvases that lean against walls or hang overhead in various stages of becoming. At the centre of it all stands Beaumont herself, brush in hand, Blundstones on.

Elizabeth Beaumont was among the first artists to exhibit at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, when the gallery’s program was still in its infancy. Her debut solo exhibition, Everlasting, marked an important turning point in her career. Its immediate success gave her the confidence to commit fully to painting. Since then, she has presented two further solo exhibitions and appeared in several significant group exhibitions, each body of work revealing an artist growing steadily more assured in her language of abstraction.

Each of Beaumont’s paintings is anchored by mark-making at once broad and fluttering, and tonal decisions that celebrate the honey yellows and rich earth spectrum of her local landscape. The painterly arabesques and flecks of pigment suggest a place in flux, rippling with life.

One of the great strengths of abstract painting is its capacity to preserve the movements of its creation. Every gesture, revision and hesitation remains embedded within the finished surface. Rather than pursuing a figurative likeness, abstraction allows an artist to distil experience to its essentials: travelling lines scoring a canvas, layered colour, and the multitude of associations these simple elements can evoke.

For Beaumont, the Australian bush is an enduring source of inspiration. Across these twelve paintings is the unmistakable feeling of moving through it: brushing past flowering shrubs, breathing the scent of eucalyptus, stepping into shafts of light beneath the canopy. Hers is not a landscape observed from afar, but one experienced from within.

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.