Two Person Book Club

In October, Michael Reid Northern Beaches will present our first full-scale solo exhibition from 2024 National Emerging Art Prize winner Xanthe Muston at The Garden Gallery on the grounds of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. Beautifully realised over the course of a year-long mentorship with Michael Reid Galleries, which formed part of her NEAP prize, works from Muston’s forthcoming series, Two Person Book Club, are now available to view and acquire by request.

Influenced by her PhD studies in English Literature, Muston takes the written word as a starting point to create her narrative-rich scenes. For Two Person Book Club, the artist began by inviting her sitters to share a favourite poem, short story or novel, letting their collaborative discussion shape the resulting work.

“Together we created a composition that recasts the chosen narrative scene to contemporary Australian life,” says Muston, whose series is nested with allusions to a library of texts: from Madame Bovary, Leaves of Grass and Atonement to Australian author Jessica Au’s 2022 novel Cold Enough for Snow. “I seek to show how the edges between the mediums of painting and words are not barriers, nor boundaries, but bridges.”

In doing so, Muston upends the relationship between words and pictures, reversing the act of describing art in words – the literary device known as ekphrasis – so that her paintings give new life and resonance to classic, beloved books. “From Homer and Virgil to Keats and Wilde, authors have engaged in a dialogue with artists for different reasons and in different depths. My paintings explore this relationship in reverse: the visual description of a work of literature,” says Muston. “This exhibition asks, what are the narratives that stay with us? And how might the visual depiction of literature exceed straightforward illustration?”

By celebrating the pursuit of reading and inscribing her modern-day subjects into well-known stories, Muston reveals the collaborative possibilities of something we might imagine as solitary and pays tribute to the communities we build around the writing we hold dear. Awash with beautiful blues and enriched by dazzling details, Muston’s work draws fresh and compelling connections between reality and the page.

“I’m interested in what happens when painting becomes a form of reading,” says Muston, who, in addition to her NEAP triumph, has received the Lane Cove Emerging Artist Prize and the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mosman Art Prize. “Every painting is a joint act of interpretation. The sitter becomes a co-author. Together, we imagine the scene anew.”

To receive a preview catalogue and secure an acquisition before the opening of Two Person Book Club by Xanthe Muston at The Garden Gallery, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

“Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”

– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.