Eora/Sydney-based contemporary painter Miranda Joy Summers will make her Northern Beaches debut in April with Rock Tree Flow, having previously dazzled visitors to our Southern Highlands gallery with the captivating waterscapes of her entirely sold-out 2025 solo show. “For me, absorption of place is everything,” says Summers, whose new series can now be previewed by request, with in-person viewings available for a limited time at our Chippendale gallery. “However you approach it, the experience of the landscape has to permeate your whole being; it has to get into your soul. I absorb location through all my senses, especially on bush walks. I take endless photographs, capturing both the expected and the incidental.”

Using a painting knife and oil, Summers carves out the essence of water and land – the interplay between soluble and solid matter, negative and positive space, tumbling rock faces peeking through lacy thickets of foliage. Her knife strokes are deliberate, textural and expressive, drawing foreground and perceived distance into striking proximity and balancing the landscape’s visual density with the serene aura that is the sum of its parts.

Returning to her studio inside a rambling Victorian home wreathed by gardens on Sydney’s Lower North Shore – close to the Middle Harbour inlets where she captures much of her source material – Summers studies and manipulates her images, drawing over them with an iPad and playing with light and shadow. “Then I return to the site, revisit the atmosphere, take more photos and refine the emerging idea,” she says. “It’s a layered process of memory, observation and re-immersion. The final work is grounded in reality, but distilled through repeated looking, sensing and imagining.”

For previews and priority access to the artist’s forthcoming body of work, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrated Māori-Australian artist Sarana Haeata makes her Newport exhibition debut in April with Honey I Understand. Based in Margaret River, Haeata has built a distinctive painting practice that explores movement, surrender and the emotional landscapes of motherhood through layered abstraction and sketch-like figurative forms.

“Honey I Understand looks at the shared threads that run through many women’s lives, especially through motherhood,” says the artist, who was named a finalist in the 2025 National Emerging Art Prize, with her shortlisted work published in Belle magazine among the editors’ picks from the program. “It speaks to the feeling of being caught in the churn of responsibilities, expectation and unwavering movement that pervades everyday life.”

Haeata has exhibited internationally with Tappan Collective in Los Angeles and held solo exhibitions in Sydney. In addition to her Belle feature, her work has appeared in Vogue Living and other leading art, design and lifestyle publications. Honey I Understand represents a marked broadening in scope for an artist whose star is on the rise, even as her work remains intimately attuned to inner worlds, daily rhythms and emotional nuances – all observed and gently expressed through fluid undulations of vivid tonality and tempered effulgence.

“There’s a quiet understanding that passes between women who recognise this feeling in each other,” says Haeata, who finds calm not in stillness, but in yielding to motion itself. “The work explores that space between losing yourself and slowly finding yourself again, and the small moments of freedom and clarity that can appear in the middle of it all.”

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

Chanel Durante’s practice explores emotional landscapes through layered, intuitive painting. She is interested in states of transition, moments when certainty dissolves and something new begins to take form.
Each work begins from an inner sensation rather than a fixed image. Through layering, removing, and rebuilding, the surface becomes a space that holds time, hesitation, and movement. The painting evolves as a process of listening.

Describing her work, Durante explains, “Landscape, in my work, is not a specific place but an interior condition. Light, shadow, and colour function as emotional registers rather than descriptive elements. I see each canvas as a threshold, a suspended space where stillness and change coexist. The work does not aim to represent, but to evoke presence.”

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

Stripping away the familiar and confronting the unknown, Jade Sibinovski’s painting practice is an ongoing fascination with the unseen, the unusual, and the uncanny. Through collage I chase the unexpected – often translating those discoveries into painted form.

Through assembling, dissecting, and overlapping fragments of coloured paper, inadvertent arrangements surface – shapes intersect, and abstract worlds coalesce from flat planes. Every cut inviting new possibilities. Forms emerge intuitively, conjuring juxtapositions and configurations that feel strangely alien – arriving unbidden from some far-off, elusive realm that lies just beyond the reach of conscious perception. She invites accident to lead, allowing what emerges to reveal itself on its own terms. This ongoing dance between precision and unpredictability is the heart of the process.

From these paper constructions, Sibinovski selects compositions and translates them onto canvas, aiming to capture their raw essence in painted form. “Not every collage resolves into a painting – and that uncertainty is what keeps the mystery alive. It preserves the sense that something unknowable has briefly surfaced, hovering between revelation and concealment. It’s the unknown announcing itself.”

This very uncertainty draws the viewer into the same threshold space: a quiet confrontation with what resists naming, yet insists on being seen—as Paul Klee observed, “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

Transient Grace is a still life exhibition that dwells in the quiet poetry of fleeting moments—those instances where beauty, memory, and time briefly align before dissolving.

Bringing together the works of Leanne Thomas, Nicky Kennedy, Leanne Harrison Davies, Kirsten Hocking, Sigrid Patterson, Georgia Pricone, Bethany Saab, Laura White and Melanie Vugich, the exhibition explores still life as a contemporary language of reflection and remembrance. Each artist captures elegant, sophisticated moments in time, transforming the ordinary into something contemplative and resonant.

Transient Grace invites the viewer to slow down and look closely. In these composed fragments of lived experience, memory becomes tactile and time feels momentarily held. These works do not seek permanence; instead, they honour impermanence – grace found in transition, beauty shaped by its inevitable passing. The exhibition offers a shared meditation on fragility, intimacy, and the enduring emotional power of stillness.

Bellingen-based contemporary painter Melanie Waugh returns to Michael Reid Northern Beaches in February with her luminous new solo exhibition, Coastal Canopies. A homecoming of sorts for one of the most beloved names in our stable of represented artists, this marks Waugh’s first full-scale solo presentation since the acclaimed Due North in early 2025 – a pivotal project that found the artist pushing her practice into more ambitious and expansive terrain. Further honing her buoyant, emotionally resonant style while deepening her engagement with the New South Wales coastline, Waugh returns with a sublime collection of expressive coastal scenes that envelop the viewer in a lush tangle of foliage – conjuring a mood both familiar and faraway as it moves through a sequence of languid waterside idyls.

Across some of Waugh’s largest canvases yet, Coastal Canopies travels from Bangalley Headland in Avalon, just north of our Newport gallery, to the subtropical reaches of Byron Bay. Along the way, the artist pauses at places such as Arakoon, Angourie and The Basin, distilling their atmospheres into paintings that feel less like descriptive records than sensory impressions shaped by memory, movement and light. As artist Joel Dickens writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Although most of these places have been known to Mel for years, some have been stumbled upon more recently, sparking an immediate connection.”

Throughout the exhibition, glittering expanses of aquamarine water are framed by spiky pandanus, swaying palms and strappy foliage, brought to life through Waugh’s confident, full-bodied applications of colour and gesture. Thick, expressive brushstrokes build surfaces that shimmer with luminosity, while compressed perspective draws foreground and background into close proximity. “A myriad of greens and blues sit in lush relief from the canvas surface, against washes of peach and lilac,” writes Dickens, noting how Waugh subtly subverts depth to create images that hover between representation and abstraction.

Alongside the sunlit seascapes that have become a hallmark of her practice, Coastal Canopies presents a suite of beachy nocturnes in which deep ultramarine skies appear dusted with a smattering of stars and moonlight glides above darkened waters and silhouetted trees. These paintings carry a hushed, enchanted atmosphere, evoking the particular magic of a breezy subtropical summer night soundtracked by the rhythmic roar of the ocean.

A gentle nostalgia runs through Coastal Canopies, evoked by familiar shoreline details, bobbing fishing boats and motifs that feel, as Dickens notes, “universally recognisable”. “The careful placement of fishing boats and palm trees against an aquamarine ocean,” he writes, “is evidence of a language built beyond the initial scene of inspiration and created during the process of painting.”

While Coastal Canopies is anchored by several expansive, immersive canvases, it is punctuated by a group of more intimate works depicting shells gathered from the shoreline. In these closely observed paintings, Waugh applies her expressive vocabulary to the sculptural forms of beachcombed finds, revealing their quiet monumentality and tactile presence. Together, the sweeping coastal vistas and these smaller studies speak to the breadth of her vision – from enveloping environments to moments of concentrated attention.

With Coastal Canopies, Waugh continues to honour the natural world through what Dickens describes as “a spontaneous, yet multifaceted, interpretation”. Referencing the visual shorthand of the picture postcard and travel photography, she paints the coast not as a fixed image but as an accumulation of sensation – filtered through time, memory and feeling. Her bold, loosely gestural brushwork conveys a sense of lightness and ease that feels attuned to the rhythms of the environments she depicts. The resulting series is at once buoyant and assured – grounded by experience and open to chance – inviting the viewer to linger within its rhythms of light, colour and coastal air.

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

Showing throughout February at Michael Reid Northern Beaches, Sunkissed brings together three distinctive voices in Australian contemporary photography — Petrina Hicks, Andy Jon Morris and Yvette Hamilton — presenting their work in conversation with rare archival photographs by pioneering modernist Max Dupain. Tracing a line from Dupain’s iconic beach images to contemporary explorations of light, atmosphere and perception, Sunkissed considers the luminosity of the Australian landscape as both subject and generative force.

Anchoring the exhibition are important photographic editions by Dupain, whose images of Australians at leisure helped crystallise a young nation’s sunny self-image, bound up with the freedoms and optimism of modernity. Among these is an edition of At Newport (1952) — lensed just steps from where our Northern Beaches gallery now stands and held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Represented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin, Petrina Hicks is among the most influential and distinctive photographers of the past three decades. Her presence in Sunkissed follows her landmark solo exhibition Snakes and Mirrors at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Melbourne, and a succession of record-breaking secondary-market results for historical editions of her work. Hicks presents her 2019 shell photograph Melo Melo, in which a familiar coastal motif is filtered through her meticulously composed, ultra-precise lens, transforming something recognisable into an image of startling, almost uncanny beauty.

First-time exhibitors with Michael Reid Galleries, Andy Jon Morris and Yvette Hamilton bring markedly different yet complementary approaches to photographic image-making. Morris exhibits works from his Reverie series, in which sun-drenched coastal scenes shimmer and dissolve into an almost painterly soft-focus through lens blur, layered film negatives and fluid pools of saturated colour. Like glamorous snapshots of a bronzed beachgoing jet set recalled through a heady, heat-struck delirium, these dissipating images hover between memory and abstraction, channelling the dreamy haze of a summer day by the sea.

Hamilton, an interdisciplinary artist based in the Blue Mountains, contributes process-led works that dwell at the edges of photographic visibility. Working largely without a camera, she creates atmospheric inscriptions shaped by mist, rain, moonlight and duration, allowing light-sensitive surfaces to quietly register time, weather and place. Shortlisted for the 2025 edition of the country’s most prestigious photography accolade, The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Hamilton’s work Celestial #2 offers a contemplative counterpoint within Sunkissed, foregrounding light not as spectacle but as a slow, accumulative presence.

Completing our photography program is an online presentation of new work by Kristin Schnell, whose vividly coloured portraits of Australian birdlife are currently the subject of her solo exhibition Of Cages and Feathers at Michael Reid Berlin. Schnell’s images extend the exhibition’s concerns into constructed, hyper-lit environments, further expanding Sunkissed’s meditation on light, perception and the Australian imaginary.

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

Eternal Summer: An Abstract Edit is a summer online stockroom highlight exhibition showcasing a vibrant selection of abstract paintings from the gallery’s collection, presented alongside new works by emerging talents and artists represented in our stable. Centred on the expressive power of summer hues, the exhibition brings together bold colour, layered texture, and dynamic form to evoke the warmth, energy, and rhythm of the season. Spanning both familiar works and fresh additions, this curated edit offers a lively snapshot of contemporary abstraction – timeless in spirit, radiant in colour, and rooted in the enduring allure of summer. To discuss works from the collection, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Celebrating Five Years of Michael Reid Northern Beaches

This January, Michael Reid Northern Beaches celebrates five years by the water. Five years of championing exceptional contemporary artists in a place shaped by light, salt, and sea.

To mark this milestone, the gallery presents BIG SWELL, a celebratory group exhibition bringing together key artists whose practices have helped define the rhythm, spirit, and creative direction of the gallery over the past five years. Like the coastline that surrounds us, the exhibition reflects both constancy and change – depth, diversity, and a shared sense of place.

BIG SWELL is a moment to pause and look back at the journey so far, while gathering momentum for what lies ahead. It honours the artists, ideas, and community that have carried the gallery from its beginnings to now.

The exhibition opens on the 15th of January and will roll into a birthday celebration with our artists on Saturday, 31 January.

A celebration of natural beauty, Riptide brings together works across Luke Shadbolt’s exhibitions Maelstrom, 2016-2018, Spéirling, 2020, and The Terminator Line, 2022. In this exhibition, we see the ferocious sculptural ferocity of the ocean, but also its delicate, fragile beauty, emerge through Shadbolt’s skill with the camera.

Both Maelstrom and Spéirling act as witnesses to the turbulent tussle in nature between creation and destruction. Waves are frozen in grand moments, caught at the apex of their explosion. The stillness of the photograph, contrasting against the violent movement of the ocean, creates a moment of sculptural liminality. Like primordial dancers, white foam flies across the horizon, springing and tumbling, crashing out of sight only to soar towards the havens in a split second.

Inspired by the work of Impressionist painter J.W. Turner, The Terminator Line engages in a deft interplay between light and movement, bending the dappled light in the waves to create sublime moments of painterly beauty. It is impossible not to get lost in the waves, caught in the undulating pulses of shape and form that weave throughout Shadbolt’s works.

In bringing these works together, Riptide highlights the contrasts that are so central to Shadbolt’s work. The cycles of beauty and chaos, of creation and destruction. In these works exist primordial rituals that represent an innate humanity within all of us. A connection between light and dark, and the beauty that binds it all together.

Lauren Jones is a visual artist based on the Sunshine Coast. Working primarily in oils, her feminine portraits and still life scenes speak of moments captured in time. Lauren’s works, executed with bold and immediate brushstrokes, are evocative and impressionistic. Her art exquisitely showcases the materiality of paint and celebrates the process of painting.

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.

Currently Jones works from her art studio in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Queensland.

Coastal New South Wales–based abstract painter Ash Leslie joins our summer group exhibition, Quiet Tide, with a suite of works shaped by quiet intervals, intuitive gesture and the atmospheres of the shoreline she calls home. After nearly a decade in graphic design, Leslie rediscovered painting during maternity leave with her first daughter, developing a practice forged in the margins of the day – rigorous, intimate and unmistakably her own. “Working intuitively, I lose myself in translucent washes of oil paint, allowing my subconscious to guide me,” she says. “As the impression emerges, I let the piece rest somewhere between recognition and obscurity.”

Themes of motherhood and the natural world ripple gently through Leslie’s paintings, infusing their layered surfaces with tenderness, tension and a searching emotional clarity. Her approach – embracing chance, discovery and the quiet revelation of form – lends each work a drifting, tidal quality that sits in perfect harmony with the contemplative spirit of Quiet Tide. Recognised nationally with finalist selections in the Paddington Art Prize, Flow Art Prize and Signature Art Prize, Leslie continues to establish herself as a singular voice in contemporary abstraction.

Read our interview with Ash Leslie below. For private previews and priority access to works from Quiet Tide, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Quiet Tide HERE.

Shoalwater-based contemporary painter Nicole Steenhof joins our summer group exhibition, Quiet Tide, with a new series of paintings that emerge directly from her daily encounters with the sea. Propelled by an ongoing interest in ocean studies, Steenhof works towards an embodied painting process “alert to sensations beyond sight”, she says, developing ideas about how we might engage with “the agential life of the sea with tenderness, to relearn connection.” With this new collection, walking and swimming become quiet rituals of observation, informing subtly abstracted seascapes that hold a tension between what is seen and felt as the water shifts with the moon, light and seasonal currents. “Swimming is an anchor,” says Steenhof – a way for bodies to enter the sea and let “the motion of the saltwater dissolve edges.” This experience distilled is into subtle, tidal canvases that sit perfectly within the contemplative spirit of Quiet Tide.

Read our interview with Nicole Steenhof below. For private previews and priority access to works from Quiet Tide, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Quiet Tide HERE.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is embracing the season’s slower rhythms and channelling the salubrious calm of being by the sea with our summer group exhibition Quiet Tide. Now on view at our Newport gallery, Quiet Tide brings together three luminaries of contemporary painting – Dalin Alejandrino, Ash Leslie and Nicole Steenhof – who each, in their distinct ways, wade through abstract painterly currents to articulate their emotional connection to water.

Eschewing more recognisable figurative cues in favour of feeling, these artists take fluid gestures, layered markings and tonal washes as a visual language to express the sensory pleasure of an ocean plunge, the elemental heft of breaking waves and the dreamy atmosphere of halcyon days adrift in a waterside idyll.

From Steenhof’s meditative odes to oceanic calm and Alejandrino’s feather-light abstractions of blissful moments abroad to Leslie’s softly charged studies of shoreline light and colour, each work in Quiet Tide reads as a painterly paean to water – its rhythms, its clarifying stillness and its endless power to slow us, restore us and draw us back to nature’s pace.

All works from Quiet Tide can be previewed and acquired by request in the lead-up to the show’s official opening on Thursday, 4 December. To request a preview catalogue, book a private viewing or secure an early acquisition, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Eora/Sydney-based abstract painter Dalin Alejandrino joins Quiet Tide with a new body of work shaped by memory, movement and the tender interplay between motherhood and making. A self-taught artist, Alejandrino works instinctively with translucent layers, subtle textures and free-flowing colour, creating feather-light abstractions that hover between her inner and outer worlds. “Each layer is a memory, each mark an emotion,” she notes – an approach that lends her paintings a serene, drifting quality perfectly attuned to the contemplative spirit of Quiet Tide.

For this series, Alejandrino draws on recent travels and moments of quiet clarity abroad, inviting viewers “to reflect on their own relationship with time and those precious moments we hold dear.” Sunlight dancing on an English creek, a warm summer in Puglia with her young family, and a gratitude-filled walk along the beach in Salento become emotional anchors, distilled into soft sweeps of colour and gentle tidal movements. A 2024 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award finalist with works in private collections in Australia and internationally, Alejandrino brings a quietly luminous, lyrical voice to Quiet Tide.

Read our interview with Dalin Alejandrino below. For private previews and priority access to works from Quiet Tide, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Quiet Tide HERE.