Julz Beresford  ‘Hawkesbury Studies on Paper’ 

This month, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin announced its representation of Julz Beresford, who now joins our flagship gallery’s stable of leading contemporary artists. To celebrate this fabulous news and congratulate Beresford on her major career milestone, we are delighted to present a special release of new works on paper by the Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury-based painter.Beresford’s painting practice is embedded in the experience of being in the landscape and reflects her affinity for the Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury and Snowy Monaro regions of New South Wales. Spending long and immersive stretches of time working outdoors, the artist collects her observations of tangled bushland, tumbling escarpments and snaking waterways with gouache studies and drawings that later form a critical element of her in-studio painting practice.

While transposing her plein-air impressions onto canvas to form her large-scale, atmospheric oil paintings, the artist always aims to preserve the immediacy, fluidity, emotion and expressive flourish of her original works on paper. More than a point of departure, these studies act as an essential thread between her quiet, solitudinous fieldwork and the moody and heroic paintings this informs, reflecting her ambition to convey not only the environment’s visual character but also its energy and the experience of being there.