Sunkissed

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