The fifth edition of our annual exhibition in collaboration with Country Style magazine is now open, showcasing new artwork by six leading artists across three Michael Reid spaces.

Titled Our Country, this expansive group show takes viewers beyond the city limits into varied and vividly conjured terrain as artists reflect on their personal ties to the land and the shared experiences it shelters.

At Michael Reid Murrurundi, Our Country occupies the entire gallery space, comprising a collection of Fiona Smith’s exuberant portraits of native birdlife set against graphic, whimsical patterns. These play out alongside sumptuous, large-scale paintings by Baden Croft, whose rhythmic gestures evoke the tangle of floral and arboreal forms found along the Mornington Peninsula.

At Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Jo White and Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan each present new works across the gallery’s top-level and mezzanine spaces, with White delivering brilliant birds-eye impressions of typically Australian suburban and semi-rural streetscapes, and Cullinan exhibiting her sublime, sweeping visions of Indulkana Country.

For the first time, Michael Reid Northern Beaches is among the settings for our Country Style exhibition. Celebrated for her epic, sunburnt topographies, WA artist Carly Le Cerf will is joined by Elizabeth Beaumont, whose earthy, abstract markings effect expressive, emotionally charged portrayals of her NSW Southern Tablelands home.

We look forward to welcoming visitors to our 2024 Country Style show. To enquire about available works of art, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

The fifth edition of our annual exhibition in collaboration with Country Style magazine presents new work by six leading artists across three Michael Reid spaces in a roving celebration of Australia’s diverse and dazzling landscapes.

Titled Our Country, this expansive group show takes viewers beyond the city limits into varied and vividly conjured terrain as artists reflect on their personal ties to the land and the shared experiences it shelters.

At Michael Reid Murrurundi, Our Country will occupy the entire gallery space, comprising a collection of Fiona Smith’s exuberant portraits of native birdlife set against graphic, whimsical patterns. These will play out alongside sumptuous, large-scale paintings by Baden Croft, whose rhythmic gestures evoke the tangle of floral and arboreal forms found along the Mornington Peninsula.

At Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Jo White and Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan will each present a suite of new works across the gallery’s top-level and mezzanine spaces, with White delivering brilliant birds-eye impressions of typically Australian suburban and semi-rural streetscapes, and Cullinan exhibiting her sublime, sweeping visions of Indulkana Country.

For the first time, Michael Reid Northern Beaches is among the settings for our Country Style exhibition. Celebrated for her epic, sunburnt topographies, WA artist Carly Le Cerf will be joined by Elizabeth Beaumont, whose earthy, abstract markings effect expressive, emotionally charged portrayals of her NSW Southern Tablelands home.

We look forward to welcoming visitors to our 2024 Country Style show. To register interest and request a preview, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Julz Beresford is an expressive artist who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNSW Art & Design (COFA). She has been recognised as a finalist in several art competitions including the Hornsby Art Prize 2019, the Northern Beaches Art Show 2019, and the Mosman 2088 in 2019 and 2020.

An essential part of Beresford’s practice is being in the landscape, to be still and present observing nuances which inform the way she focuses her attention. It is here that Beresford collects her Gouache studies and drawings which later become a critical part of her studio-based work. These plein air studies refocus her mind back to what had captured her attention.

Often Beresford responds to the colour of her subjects and searches for locations where she finds a connection. One which pushes her studio-based practice to rethink the physical application of this expression. She is interested in questioning the physical process of mark-making in such a way that translates the observed ‘real’ into an expressive piece of art. She asks herself, ‘how does the process of mark-making translate the essence of the place I’m trying to recreate?’

Beresford’s intent is for the audience to feel engaged with the energy of the landscape. Her works are both an expressive piece of the whole process, and an embodiment of how it actually feels to be there. Her paintings have a sense of intense energy. She paints alla prima with a vigorous and spirited application, challenging herself to remain in the moment and ‘solve’ the painting as a whole.

Beresford likes to work on multiple locations at once, keeping herself alert. She finds the expression of one landscape can, and will, inform the other. The purpose being to constantly question the physical application, and where it takes her work.

One of the great privileges of working in our field (among many) is witnessing how the artworks we exhibit go on to enliven and enrich the private lives of collectors. There is a great deal of pride and connoisseurship in deciding what works they choose to adorn their interiors, and it never fails to fascinate us. A smartphone shot of someone’s living room is more than enough to illustrate their inner curator.

For this first edition of A Collector’s View, we were warmly invited into the beautiful home of a local, someone who has created a salon-like refuge in their Fitzroy Falls home. Every wall, bookshelf, and piece of furniture reflects their eclectic passions and influences. Carried along with me were a selection of available works from the Michael Reid Southern Highlands stockroom, which can be found dotted throughout these images.

Home is Grace’s second solo exhibition with Michael Reid galleries & follows on from her sold out show Grace at our Northern Beaches gallery in February 2023.                                                                                                            

“Home is an exploration of what’s embedded in the objects around us. It is a collection of scenes that evoke the meaningful memories tethered to our homes. These paintings are composed to be a suggestion of what surrounds. With attention to colour and tone I’ve hoped to reflect a small part of a big scene, without the bounds of the canvas. It’s an entire bowl when only the edge can be seen, it’s a whole table setting shown by a glimpse of tablecloth, it’s a beautiful home in a simple image.I’m hoping this series can remind us its memories held in these small and seemingly mundane objects that create Home.” ~ Grace Butterfield 2023

Situated on the eastern outskirts of Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, the Iwantja Arts Centre at Indulkana, SA has always been an inventive platform for contemporary First Nations art. Beginning as a small communal printmaking facility, the vision of its founding directors has seen, almost fifty years later, Iwantja Arts at the forefront of local and international contemporary art discussion. In January 2024 Michael Reid Southern Highlands will exhibit new paintings by five artists, all of whom are instrumental in the collective success of Iwantja Arts.

Following her 2023 Hadley’s Art Prize win (Hobart, TAS), Yankunytjatjara artist Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan will exhibit alongside her mother, Emily Cullinan, who this year has presented exhibitions at Michael Reid Murrurundi and Michael Reid Northern Beaches. New and vibrant paintings by Raylene Walatinna will also exhibit, made following her appointment as a 2022 AGNSW Sulman Prize Finalist. (Raylene Walatinna was a finalist with Ngayuku Ngura – My Country, 2022, painted in collaboration with her mother, Betty Chimney). Rising new voice Rosalind Tjanyari joins our exhibition, alongside Priscilla Singer, an accomplished painter and daughter of Kunmanara (Sadie) Singer.

Then/Now/Always at Southern Highlands commences a full year of Iwantja Arts collaboration across the Michael Reid Gallery network. This exhibition also follows the 2023 release of IWANTJA, a major publication profiling the history of Iwantja Arts and artists. Copies of IWANTJA (Thames & Hudson) can be purchased ahead of our exhibition via the Southern Highlands online Concept Store.

For more information and pre-viewing opportunities, please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Northern Rivers-based painter Lucy Vader transports us to halcyon days in sprawling pastures with her latest series, The Golden Hour. We are delighted to welcome this singular artist back to the Southern Highlands with the opening of her luminous new show in our upstairs gallery.

Depicting rolling paddocks dotted with grazing animals and happy birdlife, Vader’s pastoral scenes come flickering into view with dazzling exuberance as gutsy sweeps of paint break open to undercurrents of pure colour. These areas of neon-tinged abstraction appear like flashes of prismatic light in the landscape, as though refracted by clouds or washes of rain that soak the fields with lushness and vibrancy. For a moment, the figurative seems to glitch and give way to vivid, emotionally charged tonal undulations.

The Golden Hour is an expressive celebration of Vader’s home in Northern NSW, reflecting her complex relationship to an environment that can be, by turns, bucolic and wild, always subject to mercurial elemental shifts.

The sense that Vader’s landscapes are on the cusp of transformation is echoed by the energy and immediacy instilled by her gestural painting approach. Throughout The Golden Hour, the artist vividly captures precise points in time when the landscape is alive and the light becomes magical.

To speak with a Gallery representative about paintings in this exhibition, please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au

Sierra McManus graduated from the National Art School in 2002 with a major in painting. In 2016, on returning to the Bega Valley with its rich community of potters, her focus shifted to clay and her paintings took a new form. Using underglaze and oxides in place of watercolour and oils, her work now wrapped around her hand built functional and sculptural ceramic pieces. Having previously exhibited with Michael Reid’s Northern Beaches and Murrurundi Galleries, this is her first collection to be shown in the Southern Highlands.

Of the collection of vessels that make up ‘Matter & Memory’, Sierra says; “These vases are built from blended and reclaimed clays, each unique combination yielding its own form. The forms are painted with patterns, in iron oxide and underglaze, interpreted from cloths draped over chairs or hanging or lying about the studio. A vintage bed sheet sent to Phoebe from a friend in Tasmania or a curtain Melody had hung at Violet Hill. The patterns wrap themselves around the vase forms, bend and distort. In the end or where the pattern meets or a seam forms, the motifs confront themselves and a new pattern emerges. Recognition’s sparked – childhood sheets faded and flapping on the hills hoist, some special cloth folded away in a dark cupboard or a once loved shirt worn to exhaustion repurposed as ties to hold a tomato plant to its stake. Holding some common nostalgia, memories unfold invigorating new purpose.” – Sierra McManus 2023

Debbie Mackenzie is an artist residing on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. After studying Graphic Design and then following a career in advertising, Debbie embarked upon a journey into the romantic.  She quickly established herself as one of the most exciting emerging artists to watch and has gone on to be involved in countless sell-out solo shows and group exhibitions. Debbie ‘s work is largely about reverie, a sense of place and a desire to be there. Inspiration comes from Debbie’s childhood, spent on the Mornington Peninsula and holidaying at their century-old family beach house at Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road. These land and seascapes provide a rich and endless source of motivation. A John Leslie Art Prize Finalist in 2020 & 2018, The NEAP “ACB Selects” 2023 finalist. Debbie has exhibited in numerous successful solo shows and group exhibitions and has work in private collections around Australia and internationally.

“My practice revolves around my desire to capture the incredible beauty of the Australian landscape, both where I live and further afield. Returning to where I either have been or where my imagination takes me afterward.Away from the frenetics of modern living to the ease and gentleness of the landscape and all its contemplation.  I am uncontrollably immersed in these landscapes.  Chronicling my absolute captivation with the peace it brings me. My hope and motivation is that the viewer can feel that not just see it. To feel peaceful, we all need that!” ~ Debbie Mackenzie 2023

Lauren Jones is a visual artist based on the Sunshine Coast. Working primarily in oils, her still life scenes speak of moments captured in time. Lauren’s works, executed with immediate brushstrokes, are evocative and impressionistic. Her art showcases the materiality of paint and celebrates the process of painting through a delicacy and freshness rendered by the alla prima technique.

Born in 1989 in Queensland, Jones earned a Bachelor of Arts (Creative Literature) from the Sunshine Coast University in 2009, and in 2012 a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from Monash University.
Lauren has shown at Michael Reid Northern Beaches over the last 2 years with her last exhibition, ‘Papaver’ April 2023 being incredibly well received with our collectors. Currently Jones works from her home studio in the Noosa Hinterland, Queensland. Her work is held in private collections across Australia.

“The paintings from ‘Postcards from the Museum’ are inspired by the late 19th century French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. I find myself drawn to 19th century European Still Life artists, mostly for their moody, atmospheric and textural flower paintings. Fantin-Latour’s work particularly stands out to me stylistically for being on the cusp of impressionism. I’m interested in the space between loose impressionism and realist tonal work. I like to see the workings and movement of the paint, but I’m also interested in capturing the light and trueness of shadow and tone.

This exhibition explores the idea of ‘inspiration’ and of artwork informing artwork. I love this hopeful notion of perpetually existing in the art world. Of new paintings being inspired by old paintings and the relationship of the modern and the old world.
As an art school student I was often in awe at the old masters paintings while wandering around gallery museums. Filled with inspiration, I would always visit the gift shop on my way out the gallery, wanting to take home some token to remind me of my experience and the paintings that moved and inspired me. A postcard of a painting, (the most affordable item) was a popular choice. This show explores that idea of an admired artist’s painting, printed on a postcard, purchased and kept as a reminder of the lived and experienced ‘inspiration’. A small token of an old master painter inspiring and influencing a new series of paintings in a contemporary era and in turn these new works perhaps informing another.” ~ Lauren Jones 2023