Our last five years in Newport have been a wonderful ride, showcasing an incredible array of stunning artworks from talented artists across the country. As we take the next step in the gallery’s journey, moving to our new, larger gallery space in Brookvale, we wanted to thank you for all your support over the last five years of Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

As a token of our appreciation, it is our pleasure to invite you as one of our qualified customers, to this special one-of-a-kind sale. We look forward to you joining us on the next phase of our adventure.

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

The Michael Reid Northern Beaches team has curated an abuntant selection of perfectly petite paintings to bring intimate yet enriching moments of beauty, grace and interest to our smaller spaces. From elegantly composed still-life vignettes to landscapes distilled in miniature, these bijou canvases possess a poise and impact that belie their scale, offering jewel-like points of focus that draw us into their micro-worlds.

Many of the bright stars of our gallery’s stable and broader exhibitions program are represented in this collection, including Melanie Waugh, Conor Knight, Louise Knowles, Lauren Jones and more. Whether tessellating to form a sprawling salon or hanging solo in the powder room, kitchen nook or on a library shelf, there is a work in this collection to suit every style and space – or make a perfectly proportioned gift.

Explore our Small Works Salon online and in the gallery until 26 September. For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

For many years, the human figure has been a constant presence within Clare Dubina’s practice. She has returned to it again and again, exploring the body not as a portrait of a particular person, but as a way of expressing something less tangible: emotion, identity, vulnerability, connection and the quiet complexity of being human.

The figures within these works exist in moments of occupying space together and alone. They reflect the many ways we move through relationships with one another and with ourselves: seeking connection, finding comfort, creating distance, offering support, or simply existing alongside another.

But In Relation also speaks to Dubina’s own relationship with the figure as an artist. After years of returning to the human form, this body of work represents a culmination of that exploration. It is an opportunity to reflect on what the figure has allowed Dubina to express, discover and understand, while also making space for what comes next.

The figure is familiar, yet endlessly open to interpretation. A body can hold emotion without speaking. A gesture can suggest an entire inner world. And two bodies sharing space can say something about connection that words cannot.

In Relation is ultimately a reflection on connection between bodies, between people, between the inner and outer self, and between an artist and the subject that has accompanied Dubina for so long, and a quiet acknowledgement of where her work is beginning to lead me next.

Nicole Steenhof (b. 1990) is a visual artist currently working with oil painting and post consumer sculpture based in Shoalwater, WA. Completing post-graduate studies with distinction in Fine Arts at Curtin University in 2024, Steenhof has since had multiple works acquired by public collections including John Curtin Gallery and the City of Melville. She has been a finalist in many art awards throughout WA, including Mandorla Art Award and Castaways Sculpture Awards, and won Emerging Artist at Royal Prize for Landscape award in 2024.

Swimming in the ocean through the seasons has given me an appreciation for all of the different qualities each day brings – the same ocean is new every time. It has helped me find an embodied way of painting the ocean. The paintings have ribbons not only of dark and light, but of shape formed by colour. Oil paint is applied and removed, allowing the underpainting to gleam through, much like the water is understood by its opaque reflection of the sky and also its transparent substance. The paintings mimic the way the ocean shifts, disappears, reappears.

Through swimming, you experience a sense of one’s own wateriness and a fading of boundaries between the depth beneath, the reflection of the sky, and between bodies of water (yourself and the sea). The title of the collection is based on a resolution to a dream that my daughter had, where the ocean filled our home and yet it didn’t matter to my daughter who said she found ‘a window to swim through’. It’s my hope that these paintings function in a similar way, that the paintings of the ocean become a window to swim through, a portal of freedom.

In Diary of an Artist Kerri Kerley’s paintings offer a visual diary of daily life. They represent moments, and memory over time, exploring a world the artist finds fascinating and bewildering.

Water is a recurring theme in this latest exhibition. A place of mystery and magic, with kaleidoscope of colours and reflections of trees and sky. Describing her connection to the water in Diary of an Artist, Kerri explains “I am fortunately spoilt for choice with so many beautiful rivers and creeks where we live, they are a reminder of my childhood and take me back to when I would spend hours searching for tadpoles, watching and waiting for them to turn into frogs and watching dragonfly skipping across the water.

For Kerri, a painting is more successful when there is an established relationship or connection with the subject. “There is an unexplained exchange of energy that somehow translates onto the canvas, enabling me to think in colour, form, composition and light, coming together to communicate the feeling of being immersed in the landscape.”

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

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.

Light of Nature explores the sensory experience of light, place, and belonging in painting. The series started in Mantova, Italy, where Helle was artist-in-residence in 2025. There, she dyed/painted sheer silk works while immersing into the countryside. An awe-inspiring process that continued as Helle travelled via Denmark to Australia, before painting this luminous new series in the studio.
Embodied memories of each place are reflected through translucent layers of paint. Rather than a depiction, the work unfolds recent and distant sensations through gestural movement. Earthy tones merge with Nordic hues and a sense of fluidity. Always following the horizon—and beyond—an ever-present line connects each work, and the notion of living in, and between, light and place.

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

Michael Reid Northern Beaches will usher in spring with Land, Light, Memory – a group exhibition assembling 11 luminaries of contemporary landscape painting from across Australia. This expansive presentation explores relationships to place formed through artists’ sustained observation, lived experience and repeated immersions in nature. Moving between the bush, the beach and beyond – from the gothic Tasmanian wilds to the Top End – the exhibition considers landscapes not only as subjects but as vessels for memory, mood and meaning, reflected through art-making approaches that range from the loosely impressionistic to the abstract and emotionally resonant.

Land, Light, Memory will mark the Michael Reid Northern Beaches debut of several artists who have previously exhibited to great acclaim at our Southern Highlands gallery, including celebrated Tasmanian painter Zoë Fitzherbert and New South Wales South Coast artist Anthea Stead. Inverell-based rising art star Cameilia Grace Edwards will exhibit her work for the first time since the announcement of her representation by Michael Reid Southern Highlands, where she has presented two entirely sold-out solo exhibitions since her breakout turns in the 2024 and 2025 editions of the National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP).

Edwards will appear alongside fellow NEAP alumni Ana Anderson and Ben Liney, who returns to the ’Beaches after his first solo exhibition earlier this year, as well as Chanel Durante, whose moody, atmospheric abstracted landscapes were a captivating presence in her debut solo exhibition, also staged earlier this year. Joining them are Bellingen-based painter Melanie Waugh – a major star in our stable of represented artists – as well as Tasmanian painter Harrison Bowe, photomedia artist Robert Smith and Northern Territory-based painter Hannah van der Wal.

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