Clare Dubina (b.1977 UK) is a multi disciplinary artist located in Naarm (Melbourne), holding a BFA in Printmaking from the University of The Arts, Philadelphia USA. Since graduating in 2001, Dubina has moved through various creative roles within fashion photography and visual merchandising, redirecting her path in 2020 back to painting and ceramics to pursue art as a full time career. Clare draws on the female form as an ever evolving source of inspiration in her art practice, which has led to collaborations with iconic Australian brands such as Tigmi Trading, En Gold, Viktoria & Woods, and Bed Threads.

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” – Anäis Nin

This series is a study of the female form as a way of expressing emotion, rather than individual portraits of a body. Each curve and line is used to communicate a different state of being that can hold more than one voice. Moving between presence and absence, power and fragility, silence and declaration, viewers are invited to bring their own perceptions and experiences, shaping how each piece is understood.
Like Anaïs Nin’s reminder that there are “many women” within one, my figures become layered selves, shifting and transforming, showing the fluidity of identity while maintaining a sense of unity through a shared colour palette.

The Shape of Us is a study on shape, space, and quiet presence. Ceramics and paintings converse in arcs, planes, and edge, pared back to their essential geometry. In this distilled clarity, the everyday and the imagined converge, leaving only pure, quiet form.

Suzy O’Rourke is a multidisciplinary artist and ceramicist based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.  With a background in millinery and interior design, Suzy’s creative practice explores the intersection of nature, form and simplicity, expressed through both handcrafted ceramics and original artworks. Her work is ground in a deep respect for natural materials and quiet design. Each piece presents an invitation to pause, connect and bring a sense of calm and beauty into everyday life. Drawing inspiration from architecture, the natural works and the emotional quality of space, Suzy’s aesthetic is minimal yet expressive, refined and yet organic. Whether working in clay or on canvas, Suzy creates with intention, guided by texture, tone and the quiet power of restraint.

To celebrate the announcement of Brenton Drechsler‘s representation by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Michael Reid Southern Highlands, we recently sat down with the South Australian artist and two-time National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP) finalist to discuss the ideas, inspirations and experiences that have shaped his distinctive approach to painting.

“I seek out compositions that connect to my personal narrative as a queer person – whether through intimate depictions of interiors, vintage cars in foreign places or landscapes that reflect my real and imagined heritage,” says Drechsler, whose star turn in NEAP’s 2023 edition led to his first solo exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands – a creative triumph that was met with widespread acclaim and has since been followed by two more solo presentations, including his sold-out Newport debut, Stripes 3 (Alternative Views). “When I paint, I feel as though I am embedding myself into each painted environment with a renewed sense of belonging. This is also why I include a green and white stripe in every painting: it is my way of saying, ‘I was here. I exist. This is who I am.’”

Alongside our interview with Drechsler, we are pleased to present a special release of seven vibrant new streetscapes that beautifully distil the painterly signatures for which he is now widely celebrated. “I call it my Neapolitan Series,” he says of this ebullient body of work, which arrives ahead of another significant milestone – his forthcoming showing in our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s year-end group survey, Painting Now. “It is about lightening up, embracing optimism for the future, and letting go of the past, with grief and self-deprecation.”

“Brenton Drechsler’s practice makes me smile,” says Michael Reid OAM. “His paintings, often set against a heavily urbanised world, are subversively populated in this series with freedom machines – the Porsche, the Land Rover, the Kombi van and the Volvo station wagon. All are nostalgically drawn from an earlier era, each quietly longing for the freedom of the bush or the open road. What enriches this warm, multi-layered visual language is Drechsler’s painterly touch: colour-soaked, paused streetscapes filtered through a personal lens, where cars exist as vessels of memory and longing.”

To discuss works from Brenton Drechsler’s latest series or sign up for first access to his future projects, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is pleased to present Pulse by Jeannie Holker, who was awarded the highest honour for a ceramics artist at last year’s National Emerging Art Prize. Befitting the leafy environs of The Garden Gallery on the grounds of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Holker’s beautiful new series of large-scale ceramic sculptures invites fresh perspectives on how we relate to nature by plugging into the little-perceived frequencies that reverberate through the non-human world.

“Pulse is a collection that explores interspecies communication,” says the artist, who sculpts her scrolling, spiralling forms, fossil-like seedpods and totemic insect deities on a scale that conveys primordial heft and monumentality, albeit tempered by the weathered surfaces and nuanced effects wrought by the firing process.

“The ecosystems we inhabit are constantly exchanging information. Our capacity to perceive these interactions is shaped – and often limited – by our Umwelten: sensory frameworks and assumptions rooted in our own perspective. The living world emits a continuous pulse, a signal transmitted and received through an intricate web of sensory experiences.”

Guided by field research and beginning with drawings, photographs and found elements before letting her themes slowly cohere, Holker describes her process as intuitive and driven by storytelling. “I embrace imperfections as part of the narrative,” she says. “Each piece captures a moment or idea made tangible through clay.”

Holker triumphed at NEAP 2024 with Giant Pill Millipede, which connected the evolutionary endurance of ancient, elemental forms with both the vicissitudes of her medium and a sense of human resilience in the face of hostile environments. She now returns with an ambitious body of work that similarly binds conceptual rigour with a sense of natural wonder.

“I hope my work opens a window into the deeper concepts that shape how we connect with the natural world,” says Holker. “I want viewers to feel renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for the complexity of life – its beauty, fragility and constant transformation.”

To preview and discuss works from Pulse by Jeannie Holker, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to welcome back one of the stars in our stable of represented artists, Emily Gordon, who returns to Newport with Paddington Stories. This dazzling new body of work builds on the creative triumph of her previous solo show, which similarly traced the distinctive topography and historic character of the titular inner-city enclave and was shown to great acclaim at our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery last year.

“I spent much of 2024 exploring the stepped maze of streets and alleys that traverse and connect the many pockets of Paddington,” says Gordon, who was raised in Oakland, California, and now divides her time between inner-city Sydney and Gunning, NSW. “My base is the city, and while I had a general familiarity with the area, I was looking to delve into a more intimate understanding.”

In Paddington Stories, Gordon beautifully captures the eclectic jumble of Victorian rooftops and gelato-toned terraces that spill over the suburb’s slopes. Bathed in golden light and the shadows of fronds and flowering trees, Gordon’s elegant house facades, quiet backstreets and beautifully rendered architectural details are interspersed with glittering Sydney Harbour glimpses.

“For my previous show, The Paddington Project, I was hunting for expansive moments of revelation that would translate into larger-scale compositions,” says the artist. “Along the way, I catalogued moments of sunshine, humour, colour and form – snapshots better suited to the smaller board sizes I work with most often: windows into my adventures on foot, an outsider taking notes on my journeys.”

This visual archive informs Paddington Stories, a series that distils moments of delight and intrigue from her city walks. “The architecture and flora will look familiar to locals, but each work tells a story that might take an unexpected twist,” she says. “Rhythm and light, atmospherics and drama remain central preoccupations.”

To discuss works from Paddington Stories or sign up for first access to future releases from Emily Gordon, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

In Echoes of Matter, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Ben Liney offers a quiet yet powerful exploration of landscape painting through a distilled perspective on time, memory, and our place within the natural world. Working on the lands of the Bunurong people, Liney renders isolated geological forms in oil on canvas with a restrained palette and finely detailed brushwork.

These works do not depict expansive vistas, but instead focus in on solitary rock forms—elements of the landscape that endure across time. Stripped of their surrounding context, they become vessels of accumulated memory, marked by the slow, persistent forces of transformation. Through careful observation, Liney invites viewers into a more attentive way of seeing—one that mirrors the quiet persistence of the landscape itself.

His paintings are grounded in stillness and intimacy. They hold space for reflection, drawing out the quiet dialogue between matter and time, between place and presence. In doing so, Echoes of Matter positions landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as an active archive of change—one that subtly reflects our own shifting relationship to the world around us.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present our first full-scale solo exhibition from 2024 National Emerging Art Prize winner Xanthe Muston at The Garden Gallery on the grounds of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. Beautifully realised over the course of a year-long mentorship with Michael Reid Galleries, which formed part of her prize when she named Overall Winner of the Morgans Financial Prize for Emerging Painters, works from Muston’s Two Person Book Club series are now available to view and acquire online and at The Garden Gallery.

Influenced by her PhD studies in English Literature, Muston takes the written word as a starting point to create her narrative-rich scenes. For Two Person Book Club, the artist began by inviting her sitters to share a favourite poem, short story or novel, letting their collaborative discussion shape the resulting work.

“Together we created a composition that recasts the chosen narrative scene to contemporary Australian life,” says Muston, whose series is nested with allusions to a library of texts: from Madame Bovary, Leaves of Grass and Atonement to Australian author Jessica Au’s 2022 novel Cold Enough for Snow. “I seek to show how the edges between the mediums of painting and words are not barriers, nor boundaries, but bridges.”

In doing so, Muston upends the relationship between words and pictures, reversing the act of describing art in words – the literary device known as ekphrasis – so that her paintings give new life and resonance to classic, beloved books. “From Homer and Virgil to Keats and Wilde, authors have engaged in a dialogue with artists for different reasons and in different depths. My paintings explore this relationship in reverse: the visual description of a work of literature,” says Muston. “This exhibition asks, what are the narratives that stay with us? And how might the visual depiction of literature exceed straightforward illustration?”

By celebrating the pursuit of reading and inscribing her modern-day subjects into well-known stories, Muston reveals the collaborative possibilities of something we might imagine as solitary and pays tribute to the communities we build around the writing we hold dear. Awash with beautiful blues and enriched by dazzling details, Muston’s work draws fresh and compelling connections between reality and the page.

“I’m interested in what happens when painting becomes a form of reading,” says Muston, who, in addition to her NEAP triumph, has received the Lane Cove Emerging Artist Prize and the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mosman Art Prize. “Every painting is a joint act of interpretation. The sitter becomes a co-author. Together, we imagine the scene anew.”

To discuss works from Two Person Book Club by Xanthe Muston, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

“Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”

– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

‘In Full Bloom’ is a radiant celebration of spring’s awakening, featuring a curated collection of floral artworks that capture the delicate beauty and bold spirit of the season. This spring edit exhibition brings together contemporary and classical interpretations of botanical subjects — from vibrant wildflower landscapes to intimate studies of single blossoms.

Each piece showcases the unique voice of the artist, exploring themes of renewal, fragility, growth, and joy. Whether rendered in impasto, oil, oil pastels, or lino-cut, the works pulse with life, inviting viewers to pause and reconnect with nature’s quiet wonders.

We are excited to introduce our Northern Beaches audience to first time Northern Beaches exhibitors, Zaide Harker and Peta West. Joining them are familiar names from our Newport gallery program, including Northern Beaches–represented artists Melanie Waugh and Kathryn Dolby and previous exhibitors Nicola Woodcock, Kerri Kerley and many more. To discuss works from the collection, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

The works presented in this exhibition explore significant influences throughout my life, especially those inspired by nature, travel, a passion for antiques, and the study of birds and botany—essentially a journey through natural histories. This collection reflects my fascination with these themes.

Translating these historical illustrations into my work felt like a natural progression. By combining them with studies and images from different eras, I aimed to craft a cohesive narrative that functions as a kind of botanical and ornithological archive—a collection that comments on time itself, on the things we collect, Heirlooms and our memories of the past. This process led me to contemplate the meaning behind such endeavours and, more importantly, how to make these studies resonate in a contemporary setting.

My trips through numerous antique shops uncovered the pervasive nature of memory and memorabilia. It evokes nostalgia, reminiscent of visits to a grandmother’s house filled with cherished ornaments displayed on walls, shelves and cabinets. Our urge to collect and preserve meaningful items mirrors the act of displaying these recorded elements of nature.

Our connection to the environment, our consumption habits, and the memories we cherish are incredibly powerful. This body of work acts as a thoughtful reminder of the environmental crisis we face. The core message of this endeavour highlights the urgent plight of many bird and plant species hanging on the brink of extinction.

Offering a luminous antidote to the season’s chill, the Michael Reid Northern Beaches team has curated a refined selection of new and collectable paintings for our special online exhibition, Winter Salon. From emotionally charged and joyously expressive landscapes that channel the gentler rhythms of the coast in its quieter months, to pieces whose vibrancy, quietude and embrace of interior subjects provide visual pause and delicate appeal, each work in this collection will bring elegance, verve and originality to the spaces they inhabit.

Representing some of the most beloved and in-demand names in our Northern Beaches stable and from across the broader Michael Reid network, the thirteen extraordinary artists joining forces for our 2025 Winter Salon include award-winning Dharawal/Wollongong-based contemporary painter India Mark, whose exquisitely composed, richly detailed and intimately scaled still-life paintings balance elegant restraint with a quiet intensity expressed via fiery underpainting.

Joining her are familiar names from our Newport gallery program, including Northern Beaches–represented artist Emily Gordon and previous exhibitors Anh Nguyen, Nicola Woodcock, Louise Knowles, Kate Vella, Emily Cullinan, Jennifer Ross, Meg Walters, Suzie Riley and 2024 National Emerging Art Prize Award of Excellence recipient Drew Truslove. Completing this dynamic assembly are Joanne Sisson, James Lai and Eleanor Pursglove – three exciting talents whose work we are thrilled to present for the first time at Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

Winter Salon is presented exclusively online and is not physically on display at our Newport gallery. To discuss works from the collection, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au.

Now bringing radiant bursts of colour and rhythmic movement to the gallery, Beyond Form is a dynamic group show uniting three key voices in West Australian contemporary painting: Jordy Hewitt, Kate Dolan and Sara Winfield. Joining forces for a painterly celebration of abstraction’s expansive emotional possibilities, this talented trio’s new work unfolds across two rooms at Michael Reid Northern Beaches throughout August.

Pushing past the seen world and eschewing the figurative in favour of feeling, each artist contributes a distinct visual language to our Beyond Form. Whether through gossamer hues, gestural brushstrokes, intuitive markings or raw surfaces, their works treat abstraction as a means of navigating lived experience.

Jordy Hewitt’s work traces interior states and embodied experience, drawing on “life meaning, symbolism and energy” to arrive at a distilled emotional essence. Her paintings are intuitive and searching: “Everything I observe and experience is processed and regurgitated in the works and shows me something about where I’m at.”

Kate Dolan approaches her canvases instinctively, often starting with pastel gestures and letting the piece to evolve via movement and mood. Her colour fields and graphic linework offer snapshots of emotional time, shaped by experience and fleeting encounters with colour in the world around her. “Whatever is happening in my life is reflected in my paintings. I try not to plan too much – I just let them happen.”

Sara Winfield brings a raw physicality to Beyond Form, layering oil stick, sand, sawdust and paper to create textured surfaces that speak to the tension and beauty of female experience. Her work is grounded in personal narrative – a navigation of motherhood, identity and the competing demands of care and freedom. Her work offers “a reflection of my inner world… the tension between chaos and calm.”

To discuss works from Beyond Form, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present our first solo exhibition from contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler — a rising art star and two-time National Emerging Art Prize finalist who has followed up his NEAP success with two acclaimed solo shows at our Southern Highlands gallery.

Titled Stripes 5 (Alternative Views), Drechsler’s latest body of work offers a fresh window into his distinctive, psychologically rich interior scenes and streetscapes — quiet, observational, colour-soaked works filtered through a queer and deeply personal lens.

Born on Kaurna Country in Campbelltown, South Australia, Drechsler draws on his personal history to build paintings that balance stillness with vibrancy and visual complexity. Each composition feels paused in motion — a lingering moment of ambiguity and reflection. Cars sit parked, interiors hum with memory, and built environments become vessels for mood and meaning. His approach to surface, gesture and layering produces canvases that are atmospheric and unguarded, inviting open interpretation.

“I’m interested in how paint can create a sense of dislocation or opacity,” says Drechsler, who began his creative career in fashion design before turning to visual art, attaining a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art and winning the Hill Smith Art Advisory Award. “The cars and interiors feel familiar but distanced — spaces that carry emotional meaning but remain out of reach.”

A recurring motif throughout Drechsler’s work is his green-and-white stripe — a graphic, sometimes partially hidden proxy for the artist himself. “It’s a kind of non-human alter ego,” he explains in a profile published by Belle magazine alongside his Southern Highlands solo debut. The stripe serves as both a painterly signature and a metaphor for queer experience — visible yet obscured; by turns exuberant or discreet.

While autobiographical in tone, Drechsler’s paintings resist overt confession. His use of layered oil paint, blurred detail and oblique subject matter lends the work an open-ended quality, prompting viewers to enter with their own associations and memories. The stripes becomes a stand-in for that subjectivity — a subtle presence in a staged world of paused motion and shifting emotional weather.

To discuss works from the series, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is pleased to present the latest chapter in our exhibition series co-curated by our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery. Titled Tone & Landscape, this expansive group show brings together some of the most acclaimed and in-demand names in Australian contemporary art for a richly textured exploration of place and perspective – expressed through tone, surface and visual storytelling.

Joining forces for this very special presentation are leading contemporary artists Julz Beresford, Tamara Dean, Gaypalani Wanambi, Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson, Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa and Scott Perkins. All works selected to feature in Tone & Landscape are now available to acquire online, at the gallery and by request.

From raw earth hues and striking monochrome to deep velvety greens expressed through thick impasto paint, the palette of Tone & Landscape has been closely considered for its almost cocooning embrace – at once elegantly pared back and richly imbued with colour, feeling and emotional nuance.

Tone & Landscape includes an all-new suite of windswept mountainscapes formed with painterly gusto by Hawkesbury-based artist, Northern Beaches gallery stalwart and now star of our flagship gallery’s stable, Julz Beresford, who beautifully distils her nature scenes into rhythm, gesture and tone. For her return to Newport, Beresford has revisited the rugged topography of the Snowy Mountains, a place intimately tied to her childhood. Her paintings are built with layers of rich, sculptural mark-making – mountains rise and recede through sweeping strokes of oil, while moody skies and softened horizons pulse with movement and memory. Her canvases don’t so much depict the landscape as trace its emotional terrain.

While the work of 2024 Ravenswood Prize winner Gaypalani Wanambi remains on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the landmark show Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala, we are delighted to have one of her shimmering etched-metal works within Tone & Landscape. Working at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Wanambi is the leading female practitioner within the Found Movement, which dazzlingly repurposes roadside metals found on Country. “It’s staggering to see how young artists such as Gaypalani Wanambi have adopted [the] use of scrap metal to make works of startling originality,” writes art critic John McDonald in his piece on Yolŋu Power.

For her Tone & Landscape showing, acclaimed photographer Tamara Dean presents a pair of dreamlike images for which she cast her two children as collaborative muses. Evoking the lush, romantic mood of a Pre-Raphaelite painting while practising at the forefront of photographic innovation, Dean lenses her familiar subjects like folkloric figures in a forest reverie. Wreathed by overgrown foliage as they wade through water lilies in Edenic scenes that meld earthiness, ethereal elegance and elemental gravitas, the subjects of these biophilic fantasias seem plugged into nature’s untamed rhythms and enmeshed with its fecund forms.

All works from our latest Sydney Edit, Tone & Landscape, can be explored and acquired online and at the gallery. To discuss works from the series, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present an expansive new solo exhibition from one of the brightest stars in our stable of represented artists, Ben Waters. Titled What We Carry Within, the Avalon-based artist’s latest body of work is a magnificent expression of the distinctive graphic style for which he is widely celebrated.

“These paintings explore the different ways we experience the landscape,” says Waters, discussing the new series in an extensive five-page artist profile in the Winter 2025 issue of Art & Style, published in the lead-up to his show. “I’m interested in how our past experiences of place influence how we see the world around us.”

Beautifully capturing the sweeping terrain of the Pittwater – its tumbling topography and winding waterways framed by an ethereal tangle of eucalypts – Waters melds elements of realism and abstraction to create works that radiate with colour and resonate with quiet power.

As a lifelong surfer who grew up in the area, Waters has a deep, lived connection to this landscape. He describes painting as a way to process the emotional imprint of time spent in nature. “When I come back from my walks around the headlands, I drive my family nuts trying to explain the way I’m feeling,” he says. “So I paint, because it’s the only way to get it out of my system.”

This deeply personal relationship with the environment brings an authenticity to Waters’ work that is both grounded and moving.

To enquire about works from What We Carry Within by Ben Waters, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Hannah Bernadette is a self-taught visual artist based on Awabakal Country (Newcastle) whose practice explores the intimate relationship between the body, emotion and the environment. Trained as a physiotherapist, her dual careers are united by a deep curiosity for the body – its sensations, memory and the influence of the nervous system on perception and experience.

Her latest body of work, Body Talks, emerged from a transformative free-diving trip, where immersion in the ocean revealed unexpected depths, both physical and emotional. In surrendering to the water and listening to her body’s signals, Bernadette found a new way of painting: looser, more intuitive, and charged with presence. The result is a series of bold, abstract works that reflect the rhythms of breath, movement and nervous system states.

Bernadette’s background in physiotherapy – particularly her work with individuals navigating chronic pain – has sharpened her sensitivity to the body’s silent language. Her painting practice has become both an extension of this knowledge and a form of somatic inquiry. It is a space for release, reflection and reconnection, where intuition overrides control and colour becomes a tool for translation.

Working primarily on heavy canvas with acrylics, oil paint and oil pastels, she builds layered compositions through gestural mark-making and vivid contrasts. Each work pulses with energy, inviting the viewer to slow down, drop in and attune to the body’s intelligence. In Body Talks, Bernadette explores what becomes possible creatively and emotionally when we listen from within. Her work invites a return to vitality, to presence and to the full spectrum of being alive.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present The Fountain – a sublime and expansive new body of work by Bundjalung/Northern Rivers-based contemporary painter Kathryn Dolby. The opening of Dolby’s latest solo exhibition coincides with the exciting announcement of her representation by Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

Taking an intuitive, playful and emotionally charged approach to colour and line, Dolby creates psycho-geographic paintings of the landscapes surrounding her. Through gesture and abstraction, her landscapes explore the connections between the subconscious, the everyday and the sublime.

“The Fountain builds on my desire to find an interesting intersection between abstraction and representation,” says the artist, whose elegant and expressive paintings beautifully balance the intimately personal with the grandly transcendent: moments of tension and release, detail and dissipation, quiet poeticism and dramatic flourish. “I hone in on considered detail and abstract it through expressive gestures. It’s a push and pull sensation of drawing in and releasing out.”

Dolby maps this push-pull dynamic onto her process of drawing from memory, letting the mind’s eye’s haziness, abstractions and misrememberings inform the resulting pictures. “What you’re left with evokes more of a feeling than a clear scene,” she says. “There is a grappling with the unknown in these paintings … the more simplified and pared back the compositions are, the more the paintings begin to lift off into something new.”

While bringing her new series to life, Dolby became interested in The Fountain as a capacious metaphor, with its various meanings seeming apt to describe the many currents that move through her paintings. “Fountains throughout art history have symbolised rebirth, healing, holy water, the uncontrollable forces of nature and the human experience,” she says. “It’s a flow of water in constant transition between here and there. Like ourselves, moving through life, shifting, changing. The elements mirror this also and continue to reappear in my paintings as a dance with colour.”

All works from The Fountain can be explored and acquired below or by request ahead of the exhibition’s official opening on Thursday, 5 June. Kathryn Dolby is represented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

For all enquiries, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

In 2023, Xanthe Muston had the opportunity to view a retrospective of Edvard Munch’s work. In Munch’s surreal scenes, Nature is portrayed with intense drama, often rendered with more character than the human figures, who appear diminished beside towering, cliff-like trees and swirling clouds. Muston’s painting The Seasons reimagines Munch’s The Dance of Life. In her composition, Munch’s southern Norwegian coast is replaced with an Australian beach. The women from the original painting—commonly interpreted as representing the stages of female vitality and life—are reimagined as the figure of Persephone, who watches over two dancers whose movements cast dramatic shadows. Another work, Blue and Yellow, references Munch’s Red and White, presenting two figures in a sleepless, dreamlike scene. What ties these works together is a shared exploration of private introspection and the longing for connection during pale, moonlit nights, when the full moon casts fantastical shapes across the landscape.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is thrilled to present The Courage Tree by Drew Truslove, an exhibition that delves into the nuanced beauty of the bushland the artist calls home. “Standing on one rock or patch of grass, I draw the views from different angles around that point, providing a unique view of how truly beautiful and diverse an individual spot can be,” says the artist, describing the immersive approach through which he creates intricate, multi-perspective compositions that celebrate both the individuality and interconnectedness of the landscape. Working exclusively with black or blue ink, Truslove forgoes traditional hues to evoke the essence of his surroundings. “Rather than trying to match the hues and tones of the bush, the ink provides an impression of the landscape, revealing its beauty with one single colour,” he says. His drawings are rich with texture and density, inviting viewers to see the bush through a fresh, distilled lens.Drew Truslove Catalogue

To enquire about works from The Courage Tree by Drew Truslove, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present our first solo exhibition from Boorloo/Perth-based Australian/Filipina multidisciplinary artist Sherry Quiambao, who arrives at our Newport gallery with a suite of bold and brilliant photographs from her series Veiled in Bloom.

First capturing the attention of our curatorial team after a glowing endorsement from fellow photographer Petrina Hicks – one of the country’s most acclaimed contemporary artists and a major star in our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s stable – Quiambao’s work recasts ordinary and emblematic objects in playfully constructed tableaux that delve into the intersections of cultural identity, consumerism and belonging.

“My cultural identity is central to my practice,” says Quiambao, who has exhibited widely since completing her Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture at Curtin University, including at Perth Centre for Photography, the Australian Embassy in the US and at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery as part of last month’s Perth Festival. “This sense of being ‘in-between’ – never fully belonging here nor there – resonates in my work, where objects and their relationships suggest longing, resilience and reconnection.”

Exploring tensions between aspiration and humility, care and disposability, tradition and modernity, works from Quiambao’s Veiled in Bloom series present bright, sky-blue backdrops as a poppy foil for mundane and reimagined objects: flower vases made from fast-food packaging, pearls draped over plastic containers, and pencils puncturing a cluster of fruit. “These works examine how societal pressures and material culture shape our identities, with objects serving as conduits for reflection,” says the artist, whose vibrant update on the photographic still-life cleverly subverts the slick visual language of advertising to muse on materialism’s effects.

“I love experimenting with assemblage and composition, trying to create arrangements that feel both intentional and a little bit whimsical,” says Quiambao. “I find a lot of inspiration in old homewares magazines and ads from the 1980s and 90s – it’s nostalgic, but there’s also something so captivating about the styling.”

All works from Veiled in Bloom by Sherry Quiambao are now available to explore and acquire online and have arrived at the gallery as the artist gears up for her upcoming PICA-supported BREEZE residency in Makassar, Indonesia.

To discuss works from the series and secure an edition, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present the latest solo exhibition from celebrated contemporary painter and National Emerging Art Prize winner Sophie Sachs. Titled All Glass, the Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist’s luminous new series is a beautifully realised exploration of light’s evanescent qualities and the delicate, serendipitous optical effects produced by light’s intersections with glass.

“These compositions always feature direct sunlight, as the shadows play an equally important role in the arrangement as the objects themselves,” says Sachs, who worked as a lead designer with Urban Art Projects in public art for five years after completing a Master of Architecture at the University of Queensland and now, since winning NEAP’s top honour, has devoted herself to full-time art practice.

“Each work references the still-life genre through the use of familiar and commonplace objects. However, the focus of my work is on capturing the optical effects of light and conveying the fleeting nature of the present moment.”

Sachs’s architectural training is evident in her work’s sense of order, which is appealing juxtaposed with sunlight’s ephemeral, unexpected effects – its dynamic pattern play, refracted colour and dancing shadows. This interplay between order and chance is echoed in her mix of precise figuration and backgrounds consisting of ambiguous pools of colour, freeing her compositions from the realm of domestic interiors and moving towards something abstract.

With All Glass, each painting is developed and experienced in two stages. “There is the overall sense of light and colour, which can be perceived at a glance,” says Sachs. “Then, there is the detail that is experienced at a much more intimate scale. My paintings do not seek to be extremely realistic. Rather, I selectively highlight details that inspire and interest me while allowing other elements to become more stylised and retain a painterly quality.”

To enquire about available works from All Glass by Sophie Sachs or sign up for early access to her upcoming releases, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au