After completing her Masters of Architecture at the University of Queensland Sophie worked as a lead designer with Urban Art Projects in public art for 5 years. Sophie now works as a full- time artist in her home studio in Brisbane. Winner of NEAP painting prize 2022. Winner of Saint Cloche wall works award, Little Things Art Prize, 2021.

At the heart of Sachs’s practice is a fascination with light’s ephemerality, expressed through meticulous arrangements of commonplace objects that bask in direct sunlight. Shadows play an equally vital role in her compositions, weaving an interplay of form and void that pays homage to the still-life tradition while reinterpreting it, capturing the optical effects of light in its most curious arrangements.

“My paintings do not seek to be extremely realistic. I selectively highlight details that inspire and interest me while allowing other elements to become more stylised and retain a painterly quality,” says Sachs. Her work operates in a two-fold approach: an immediate impression of luminous light and colour, followed by a more intimate exploration of detail.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present our 2026 End of Financial Year Edit: a selection of paintings and sculpture chosen for the originality, energy, warmth and beauty they bring to interior spaces.

Running from 15–30 June, this curated edit brings together works by artists whose practices span abstraction, landscape, still life and sculpture. From Melanie Waugh’s sun-drenched coastal scenes to Nicole Steenhof’s atmospheric abstracted waterscapes; from Meg Walters’s richly layered surfaces to the still-life precision of Sophie Sachs, each work offers a distinctive approach to colour, light, texture and form.

Alongside paintings by celebrated artists Kathryn Dolby, Emily Gordon, Debbie Mackenzie and Lauren Jones, the edit also includes an extraordinary ochre-pigmented cottonwood sculpture by Jeremiah Bonson, bringing a powerful sculptural presence to the collection. Together, these works offer a range of approaches, moods and materials, presenting opportunities to acquire original pieces by some of the most compelling artistic voices working today.

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

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

At Newport, the artist 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.

In July, Michael Reid Northern Beaches will present a companion exhibition to our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s large-scale solo presentation from senior Ngan’gikurrungurr painter, master weaver and Cultural Director at Durrmu Arts Regina Pilawuk Wilson. A seminal figure in the story of Australian First Nations art, Wilson co-founded the Peppimenarti community in 1973 in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory, establishing a permanent settlement for the Ngan’gikurrungurr people and ushering in a globally significant movement in First Nations weaving and painting at Durrmu Arts.

Our exhibition celebrates this lineage with a collection of vibrant new paintings and woven works from an ascendant generation of artists now taking up Wilson’s creative mantle at Durrmu Arts, including her daughter, Anastasia Naiya Wilson and weavers Nickolette Jimarin and Donna Liddy.

Most recently named a finalist in the 2025 Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Wilson has received numerous accolades since her defining win at the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. With her syaw (fish net) paintings, the artist channels her mastery of a generations- spanning weaving tradition into canvases soaked in colour and alive with rhythmic, reverberating movement that unspools from a central axis in ribboning, linear strokes.

The artists assembled for our collaborative exhibition with Durrmu Arts carry this interdisciplinary innovation forward. By placing one of Wilson’s syaw works in conversation with paintings and woven works by the art centre’s new guard, the exhibition draws together the strands of her practice and celebrates a dynamic continuum of artistic practice and cultural knowledge across generations.

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Represented in the stable of our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery and recently announced as a finalist in this year’s Waverley Art Prize, contemporary painter Kathy Liu makes her Michael Reid Northern Beaches debut next month with Mirage. The rising art star’s latest exhibition follows a much-admired trifecta of large-scale presentations at Michael Reid Sydney, including her entirely sold-out 2025 solo debut and her celebrated showing in the 2024 edition of the gallery’s annual Painting Now program. Since her breakout turn as a National Emerging Art Prize finalist, Liu has garnered acclaim for a distinctive, intuitive approach to abstract painting that remains porous to chance possibilities. Suggesting hazy memories, nocturnal musings or half-remembered dreams, her paintings pulse with poeticism, emotion and effervescent movement.

“I found these paintings are more playful, perhaps reflecting hazy memories of my childhood. The orange sunlight that casts long shadows over the ground in the northern cities of China, the afternoons spent happily playing after school, the time I stood on the balcony watching the thunderstorms, counting each flash of lightning, when I would walk slowly with my grandma to the nearby market. The cool summer nights listening to the song of the frogs. All of these are only potential narratives that I drew from my pictures. Like mirages, audiences might have their own interpretations.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present The Moments In Between – the latest solo exhibition by Avalon-based contemporary painter Ben Waters. A star among our Newport gallery’s stable of represented artists and one of the most distinctive voices in Australian contemporary landscape painting, Waters is a major force within the creative community of our idyllic slice of coastal Sydney. The artist’s celebrated painting practice remains grounded in his enduring connection to the waterways, escarpments and bushland surrounding his lifelong home on the ‘Beaches.

After sketching during long, meandering bushwalks, Waters returns to his Avalon studio to translate his impressions of the landscape through a highly original visual language. Beautifully capturing a tangle of willowy gums as they arch, overlap and sweep down towards glittering expanses of water, Waters brings his paintings to life with a bold graphic charge, emotional heft and an approach to colour that is entirely his own.

“In between a view, a tree, a branch, a moment,” notes the artist in the Moleskine he kept during the making of his new body of work – musings that ultimately inspired the show’s title. “In between an ocean, a bay, the tides, our thoughts. In between the sun, the shade, the wind, our breath. In between what we see, we feel, we remember, we share. In between them all are simply moments.”

The Moments In Between follows the artist’s recent collaboration with leading furniture and lifestyle brand King Living, which saw his works installed within King’s new Balgowlah flagship as a fitting welcome to the ‘Beaches from one of the area’s most acclaimed creative voices. “I know a work is finished when the feeling at the end matches the feeling I had when I first started thinking about the painting,” he tells writer Grace Elliot in a story covering his King collaboration. “I hope people continue that conversation in their own way. When they bring it into their home, it becomes part of their story and hopefully sparks their own memories of being in nature.”

Throughout The Moments In Between, Waters conjures landscapes poised between observation and memory, immediacy and reflection. Vibrant passages of colour and interlacing forms evoke the shifting moods of the bush, the play of light across water and the fleeting sensations that linger long after a walk has ended.

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Eora/Sydney-based artist Nicola Woodcock makes her much-anticipated return to Michael Reid Northern Beaches with Harbour Flora – a dazzling new suite of bright and ebullient nature studies. Woodcock is among the most beloved and in-demand names to regularly light up our program, delighting visitors to our Newport gallery with a slew of special releases and group showings, including her star turn in our fifth-anniversary show. Following the success of these projects, as well as her 2025 solo exhibition at our Southern Highlands sister gallery, Harbour Flora marks her first full-scale solo presentation in three years.

“In autumn, I began walking the Sydney Harbour trails as a weekly ritual – moving from The Spit to Manly, Bradleys Head to Chowder Bay and on to Balmoral – seeking both exercise and mental clarity,” says Woodcock of the seeds for her series. “Along these foreshore tracks I observed the native flora growing through sandstone, leaf litter and coastal scrub, becoming increasingly aware of the shifting colours and textures of the season.” Most recently selected as a finalist in the 2025 Waverley Woollahra Art School 9×5 Landscape Art Prize, Woodcock has previously appeared in the Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize, The Little Things Art Prize and the National Emerging Art Prize among other prominent Australian art awards.

“Walking through the landscape brought a sense of liberation and peace,” says the artist. “The act of walking the trails along the harbour’s edge sharpened my attention to the resilience and sculptural beauty of the native plants: banksias aglow against dry earth and clumps of delicate flannel flowers emerging through tangled bushland.” Back in the studio, the artist works with oil pastels on custom birch panels, beginning with a brown wash of pastel to dirty up the colours and introduce contrast as she lays down her vibrant hues. “Using a palette of earthy reds, browns and ochres contrasting with jewel-like bursts of colour, these artworks explore the native flowers I encountered,” she says, describing Harbour Flora as a series shaped by “memory, movement and atmosphere.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Autumn Nights at the Bowlo is a new body of work by North Coast artist Leona DeBolt. Her practice is driven by an expressive energy, grounded in curiosity and a commitment to experimentation.

Working primarily on canvas, DeBolt explores non-traditional materials to build richly layered, textured, and playful surfaces. Guided by instinct and an openness to process, she continuously reworks each piece until it reaches a sense of balance. Her paintings emerge through this intuitive dialogue, where spontaneity and intention exist in equal measure.

Drawn to abstracted portraiture, DeBolt constructs her figures through layered applications of acrylic, oil, enamel, raw pigment, pastel, and charcoal. Her work moves fluidly between control and release, embracing uncertainty as an essential part of the process and allowing each piece to unfold organically over time.

Set against the gentle rhythm of Wooli’s coastline, DeBolt’s latest series, Autumn Nights at the Bowlo draws on memories of holidays spent with friends—those treasured autumn evenings along the narrow strip between river and ocean, where the sound of waves mingles with the distant hum of a band at the local bowlo.

These portraits capture a cast of characters gathered at a fibro fishing shack, suspended in the quiet in-between of dusk as the sun slips below the horizon. Tinny in hand, they linger in easy conversation, where fleeting moments take on a quiet significance and the everyday is rendered enduring.

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Melbourne based painter Betra Fraval has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victoria College of the Arts and has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne since 2008 at institutions including Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, C3 Contemporary Art Space and Res Artists, Glasshouse Studios. Her work has been included in group exhibitions since 2007 in Victoria and New South Wales and internationally in Finland, Peru and France at institutions including Gippsland Art Gallery, The Dax Centre, Bayside Gallery, Bus Projects, Bundoora Homestead, Victorian College of the Arts and Seventh Gallery.

Betra has undertaken residencies at Bundanon, NSW (2025), Sanskriti Kendra in India (2009), Sachaqa Centro De Arte in the Amazon Rainforest, Peru (2018), Hôtel Sainte Valière in France (2019) and the Helsinki International Artist Programme in Finland (2019). She has been a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize (2024, 2020, 2016), the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize (2022) and the R&M McGivern Prize (2019). Betra’s work is held in the collection of Artbank, Gippsland Art Gallery as well as private collections in Australia and internationally.

“These recent paintings explore landscape as physical and psychological terrain where external and internal states converge. In homage to moments of vulnerable immersion within the landscape after a period of personal upheaval, they seek lightness without denying weight. They indicate my shift toward intuitive, gestural language as figures and forms hover between emergence and dissolution. Paint is just within my control, pooling, bleeding and settling intuitively. The tender pieces hold the need to find release within a demanding world, expanding my broader inquiry into letting go—of certainty, productivity, and fixed identity—to landscapes that emotionally shape and hold us.”

Her paintings open into soft, atmospheric spaces where colour drifts and forms gently dissolve – expansive, peaceful terrains that invite you to slow down and fully immerse yourself. There’s a quiet, contemplative energy throughout. Rather than sharp detail or contrast, Fraval builds her landscapes through layered gestures, allowing paint to bleed, shift, and reform. The result is a kind of visual stillness – deeply absorbing, and almost meditative.

To register your interest, please email: sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt uses abstract painting to explore emotional and bodily experience through layered, gestural mark-making, treating painting as a physical and “messy” process of labour. The works focus on how feelings and inner states can be built up through material actions like repetition, texture, and paint buildup, with meaning emerging through the act of making rather than depicting anything literal.

Essay by Freya Bennett:

“Dirt is the womb of all becoming. It signifies beginning, fertility, renewal and life. But it also holds us in death, taking what was once ours and returning it to the earth. In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt doesn’t shy away from mess and grit. The raw energy of her emotion is alive on the canvas, drawing us into her world, because Dirty Work is a response not just to Hewitt’s world, but to our world at large. Our precious, turbulent world.

Hewitt’s paintings feel cathartic to witness, like a big, yawning, ancestral scream, a release of tension after years of hidden darkness. Dirty Work feels like getting your hands into the soil, feeling tangible life rather than witnessing horror through a screen. Dirty Work is deeply grounding, but also weightless in its release. Dirty Work is about meeting yourself where you are and letting go of where you hoped to be.

In Hewitt’s brushstrokes, I see a mother holding a child, a precious gem mid-formation, a bird nestled in the clouds, observing with the warmth of a beloved. I see an acceptance of life’s difficult parts—more than acceptance, a celebration of them—for it is through pressure that we emerge luminous.

The word “dirt” is often used to describe something shameful, something ugly to be brushed away or scrubbed out. But there is nothing shameful about ugliness. Life is a delicate balance of the ugly and the beautiful, and as we grow, as we age, the things we once deemed ugly often reveal themselves as beautiful, as our vision becomes more sophisticated. Life comes from mess, life comes from pain and difficulty; life has no interest in our crude ideas of perfection.

To witness Hewitt’s Dirty Work collection is to feel held within the unknown, and to allow the weight of things to become part of our story, without taking away the divinity that is a soft breeze, a cocoon opening, an eyelash falling, or a sapling emerging.”

To register your interest, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

“These paintings observe the quiet language of the body through small gestures that unfold within the intervals of everyday life. Partial views of hands, fabric and skin isolate fleeting interactions: a hand resting on cloth, the tying or loosening of a garment, the quiet contact between body and surface.

“The works dwell within brief moments where the body pauses, settles, or gathers itself. Often unfolding within private domestic spaces, these acts of adjustment and contact carry a quiet tenderness: small movements that suggest an atmosphere of gentle interiority.

“The compositions hold the feeling of something briefly observed. Transitional moments are suspended between movement and stillness, inviting the viewer to consider how touch and tactile awareness can anchor attention, slow perception, and cultivate intentional pauses that foster embodied awareness amid the banality of everyday life.” – Emma Currie

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present The Markers – our first exhibition from award-winning Boorloo/Perth-based contemporary painter Natalie Scholtz. Working across painting and drawing on canvas, paper and board, Scholtz draws on a deeply personal yet broadly resonant narrative shaped by her experience growing up in Western Australia, raised by immigrant parents of Persian and South African heritage.

Scholtz’s richly layered compositions delve into the in-between – where boundaries between self and other, human and non-human begin to dissolve amid sweeping, expressive painterly gestures. Faces merge, forms shift and subjects resist fixed definition, giving rise to images that are at once allegorical and intimate. Grounded in community and social exchange, her practice gives fluid form to the messy, fleshy intricacies of identity.

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Sunshine Coast Hinterland-based painter Lauren Jones makes her much-anticipated return to Michael Reid Northern Beaches with By the Hillside – an exquisite new series of still-life paintings developed from her studio in Mapleton.

Celebrated for her bold, immediate brushwork and impressionistic sensitivity, Jones approaches still life as a living, responsive form – one that remains perennially porous to the conditions of its making. “I think of these works as reflections of time and place, shaped by the light, atmosphere and rhythms around me,” she says, describing a practice that distils the fleeting qualities of her hinterland surroundings into painterly moments that feel intimate yet expansive.

With By the Hillside, Jones turns her attention to country gardens and feminine, effortlessly arranged interiors – spaces that conjure warm feelings of the family home and the quiet, intentional act of creating beauty within it. Loose and abundant floral arrangements, patterned textiles and timeworn vessels become intimate markers of daily life, where gesture and composition elevate the ordinary into something enduring and poetic.

As the seasons shift, so too does Jones’s palette; in contrast to the punchier hues of her most recent series – which channelled the languid mood of summer in a rambling weatherboard Queenslander – By the Hillside feels awash with autumnal tones. Dusty pink dahlias, juniper greens and berry-toned ginghams sit alongside delicate white anemones and unfolding Japanese windflowers, while natural seagrass baskets and loosely stacked books usher in an understated elegance, allowing light and gesture to take centre stage.

Here, the hillside is both a literal and poetic presence. “It informs the mood of the work, the crispness of morning light, the gentle turning of the season, the hush that settles into the landscape,” says Jones. “By the Hillside invites viewers to slow down and attune themselves to subtle shifts in tone, texture and light. It is a meditation on seasonality, the beauty of restraint, and the quiet, enduring dialogue between artist, home and environment.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrated South Australian contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler makes his highly anticipated return to our beachside gallery with his first solo exhibition since the announcement of his joint representation by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Southern Highlands. Stripes 6 – Open Doors arrives after his star turn in the 2025 edition of Michael Reid Sydney’s year-end group survey, Painting Now.

“This new body of paintings shifts from foreign urban streetscapes and vintage vehicles to the interiors of my own home, as well as spaces encountered during my travels,” says Drechsler, whose global roaming gives way to interior scenes steeped in personal valence.

Once again nesting his signature green-and-white stripe within his pictures – a recurring graphic motif he likens to a kind of painterly proxy – Drechsler sees painting as a way to inscribe a sense of self into the spaces he inhabits, whether far-flung, familiar or festooned with objects that suggest an imminent gathering of friends. “The works build on the cinematic quality of earlier paintings while focusing more closely on intimate, lived-in environments, characterised by intensified brushwork and an experimental pastel colour palette.”

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