Tone & Landscape

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is pleased to present the latest chapter in our exhibition series co-curated by our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery. Titled Tone & Landscape, this expansive group show brings together some of the most acclaimed and in-demand names in Australian contemporary art for a richly textured exploration of place and perspective – expressed through tone, surface and visual storytelling.

Joining forces for this very special presentation are leading contemporary artists Julz Beresford, Tamara Dean, Gaypalani Wanambi, Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson, Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa and Scott Perkins. All works selected to feature in Tone & Landscape are now available to acquire online, at the gallery and by request.

From raw earth hues and striking monochrome to deep velvety greens expressed through thick impasto paint, the palette of Tone & Landscape has been closely considered for its almost cocooning embrace – at once elegantly pared back and richly imbued with colour, feeling and emotional nuance.

Tone & Landscape includes an all-new suite of windswept mountainscapes formed with painterly gusto by Hawkesbury-based artist, Northern Beaches gallery stalwart and now star of our flagship gallery’s stable, Julz Beresford, who beautifully distils her nature scenes into rhythm, gesture and tone. For her return to Newport, Beresford has revisited the rugged topography of the Snowy Mountains, a place intimately tied to her childhood. Her paintings are built with layers of rich, sculptural mark-making – mountains rise and recede through sweeping strokes of oil, while moody skies and softened horizons pulse with movement and memory. Her canvases don’t so much depict the landscape as trace its emotional terrain.

While the work of 2024 Ravenswood Prize winner Gaypalani Wanambi remains on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the landmark show Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala, we are delighted to have one of her shimmering etched-metal works within Tone & Landscape. Working at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Wanambi is the leading female practitioner within the Found Movement, which dazzlingly repurposes roadside metals found on Country. “It’s staggering to see how young artists such as Gaypalani Wanambi have adopted [the] use of scrap metal to make works of startling originality,” writes art critic John McDonald in his piece on Yolŋu Power.

For her Tone & Landscape showing, acclaimed photographer Tamara Dean presents a pair of dreamlike images for which she cast her two children as collaborative muses. Evoking the lush, romantic mood of a Pre-Raphaelite painting while practising at the forefront of photographic innovation, Dean lenses her familiar subjects like folkloric figures in a forest reverie. Wreathed by overgrown foliage as they wade through water lilies in Edenic scenes that meld earthiness, ethereal elegance and elemental gravitas, the subjects of these biophilic fantasias seem plugged into nature’s untamed rhythms and enmeshed with its fecund forms.

All works from our latest Sydney Edit, Tone & Landscape, can be explored and acquired online and at the gallery. To discuss works from the series, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au