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Michael Reid Southern Highlands, 11b Old Hume Highway, Berrima (2026)

24/10/2026

NOW OPEN: MIRANDA HAMPSON | ‘Esoteric Lore’ | Until 22 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

The first chapter of Dharawal-based Anaiwan artist MIRANDA HAMPSON’s latest solo exhibition, ‘Esoteric Lore’, is now on view at Michael Reid Southern Highlands and will be toasted with an opening celebration today – Saturday, 24 October, 2–4pm.

We are thrilled to share that all works from the Berrima contingent of Hampson’s ambitious two-part presentation have been acquired by collectors and congratulate the artist on this wonderful result. Hampson’s return to Berrima will soon be followed by her first showing at Michael Reid Northern Beaches, where the second chapter of ‘Esoteric Lore’ opens next week, with all works now available online.

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Hampson made her Berrima debut with another sold-out series in our 2025 group exhibition ‘Lookaftering’, followed by ‘Vantage’ later that year – also acquired in its entirety. This impressive run has continued this year with recognition in the Hadley’s Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and Mosman Art Prize, where she received the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award.

Hampson’s practice entwines remarkable technical accomplishment with an interest in materiality, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. In ‘Esoteric Lore’, across some of her largest canvases yet, fine painted marks accumulate into intricate woven forms, filaments and rippling fields, giving surfaces a quality at once organic, densely layered and impossibly weightless.

The fishing net provides a central image – sometimes suspended against a neutral ground, elsewhere spreading across the canvas and approaching abstraction. Its interlocking lines offer Hampson a way to consider Country as a system of interconnected relationships, while other works explore what happens when structures come under strain. “Guided by observation, reciprocity and tidal knowledge, fish traps do not resist movement entirely,” she says. “They work with currents, migration and seasonal change.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Firman Miranda

23/10/2026

NOW OPEN: LILY PLATTS | ‘Where We Sit’ | Until 15 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

This week at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, we are delighted to welcome a vibrant new collection of paintings and ceramics by Naarm/Melbourne-based artist LILY PLATTS – now unfolding across the gallery and available to explore online. Titled ‘Where We Sit’, this new series finds fresh possibilities in a recurring subject: the chair. From roadside cast-offs and op-shop finds to seating gleaned from garage sales and online marketplaces, Platts draws on the incidental arrangements of everyday objects, transforming overlooked scenes and happy accidents into playful studies of colour, form and traces of human presence.

“I gravitate to discarded objects I encounter in transitional environments,” says Platts, a former Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship recipient and 2023 National Emerging Art Prize finalist. “Within these overlooked items lies a profound beauty and humanity that captivates me. I’m drawn to the unexpected compositions that emerge when these objects are displayed with little consideration or regard.”

Interested in the ways ordinary objects can evoke the people who live with them and the experiences they accompany, Platts returns to her show’s central motif with renewed material experimentation. Alongside a return to oil painting, ‘Where We Sit’ sees Platts continue to extend her practice into ceramics, exploring the sculptural possibilities of familiar domestic objects. Ladderbacks and bentwoods loop and contort as vessels in the round.

“We’re inundated with a constant influx of new products, fostering a mindset that views objects as easily replaceable commodities,” says Platts. “I aim to challenge this notion and prompt a reevaluation of the value of the items that surround us.” Bringing warmth and compositional whimsy to the familiar and discarded, ‘Where We Sit’ invites us to consider what the objects we leave behind might reveal about our shared experiences, personal histories and the value we assign to everyday things.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Lily Platts

23/10/2026

NOW OPEN: LINDA GREEDY | ‘Wintering’ | Until 22 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Wintering’ – the latest solo exhibition by Port Stephens-based artist and 2026 Hadley’s Art Prize finalist LINDA GREEDY. Set to be toasted with opening drinks this Saturday, 24 October, ‘Wintering’ takes Greedy’s landscape painting practice to an unprecedented scale while revealing the graceful precision and intricacy for which her work is already celebrated.

“I intentionally chose to remove myself from routine commitments to spend long stretches of time thinking, observing and hiking,” says the artist. “Hiking and the landscape allow me to settle my mind, to recalibrate, providing me with the opportunity to explore visual and emotional inspiration – solitude, exposure, shelter and beauty.”

Painting from her travels across Tasmania, Greedy develops sprawling, densely layered scenes of the island’s exposed landscape, where the distinctive silhouettes of macrocarpa pines – long planted as windbreaks against its harsh conditions – stand sentinel across the terrain. ‘Wintering’ extends her work’s geographic scope to another landscape of remote extremes and sublime beauty: the Cape to Cape Track in south-west Western Australia.

“Following the coastline through the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, the track winds inland through dense coastal heath to intermittently emerge onto rugged, windblown granite headlands,” says Greedy. “The native peppermint and melaleuca trees cling to the headlands, pruned and twisted sideways, holding out against the fierce Roaring Forties winds.”

Back home, what was encountered incidentally during these expeditions is examined and resolved as the meditative rhythm of walking gives way to the more demanding business of making a picture. Beyond this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize, Greedy has previously been a finalist in the Paddington, Lethbridge 20,000 and Muswellbrook Art Prizes. ‘Wintering’ is her third show in Berrima after two entirely sold-out collections.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Linda Greedy

22/10/2026

NOW OPEN: ‘Arratherrk – Bush Flower’ | Artists of Ampilatwatja | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

To mark the occasion of the National Gallery of Australia’s large-scale survey ‘Blossom: Country in Bloom’, where works by the Artists of Ampilatwatja are now in the spotlight, Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Arratherrk – Bush Flower’ – a new exhibition of paintings by four leading creative forces at the Central Australian art centre: EDIE KEMARRE HOLMES, JULIEANNE NGWARRAYE MORTON, ROSIE KEMARRE MORTON and JOYRENE NGWARRAYE HOLMES.

The Artists of Ampilatwatja work from a remote Aboriginal community on Alyawarr Country, where the Ampilatwatja Art Centre, established in 1999, has nurtured a distinctive approach to painting. Rather than depicting Altyerr (sacred Dreaming narratives), these artists turn their attention to the living surface and splendour of Country itself. Their paintings unfold as expansive, multi-view fields, moving beyond conventional perspective to give each element its own presence. Ghost gums rise pale against burnt earth, while wattles, mulga, spinifex and termite mounds gather in rhythmic constellations.

At times, the land is saturated with colour, with wildflowers bursting across red soil; at others, the palette settles into quieter tones, evoking the heat and stillness of the dry season. From a distance, each work reads as a vast, breathing landscape; up close, it reveals an intimate cartography of bush medicine and seasonal growth. The paintings foreground Arratherrk, or bush flowers, alongside the medicinal and sustaining properties of Country and the intergenerational knowledge through which it is understood.

“Artists explore an abundance of plant life with intimacy and restorative care,” note the NGA curators. “‘Blossom: Country in Bloom’ brings attention to themes of environmental connection, maintenance and sovereignty that continue to inform artists today.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Artists of Ampilatwatja

20/10/2026

YOU’RE INVITED: Michael Reid Southern Highlands | Saturday, 24 October, from 2pm | Berrima, NSW

Join us this Saturday at Michael Reid Southern Highlands to celebrate five new exhibitions across the gallery. Drinks will be served from 2pm, as artists, collectors, family and friends gather to mark the occasion and welcome the return of several familiar voices.

On view across all wings of the gallery: ‘Still Here’ by Georgia Pricone, ‘Nocturne’ by Irene Crowe, ‘Wintering’ by Linda Greedy, ‘Esoteric Lore’ by Miranda Hampson and ‘Street Choir II’ by Michael Davis.

OPENING CELEBRATION

Saturday, 24 October, from 2pm
Michael Reid Southern Highlands
11B Old Hume Highway, Berrima NSW

We look forward to welcoming you for an afternoon of art, conversation and good company.

GEORGIA PRICONE
Irene Crowe
Linda Greedy
Firman Miranda
Michael Davis

19/10/2026

THIS WEEK: MIRANDA HAMPSON | ‘Esoteric Lore’ | 22 October–22 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands & Northern Beaches

Opening online and at Michael Reid Southern Highlands this Thursday, 22 October, ‘Esoteric Lore’ marks the arrival of the most ambitious body of work to date by Dharawal-based Anaiwan artist MIRANDA HAMPSON. Presented in two chapters across our Berrima and Brookvale spaces, the exhibition will continue next week at Michael Reid Northern Beaches, with its second opening on Thursday, 29 October.

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Hampson made her Berrima debut with a sold-out collection of paintings in our 2025 group exhibition ‘Lookaftering’, followed by ‘Vantage’, a paired presentation with PETA WEST that was also acquired in its entirety. This impressive momentum has continued over the past 12 months with recognition in the Hadley’s Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and Mosman Art Prize, where she received the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award.

Hampson’s practice entwines remarkable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in materiality, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, fine painted marks accumulate into intricate woven forms, filaments and rippling fields, giving surfaces a quality at once organic, densely layered and impossibly weightless.

Throughout the series, the fishing net provides a central image – sometimes suspended against a neutral ground, elsewhere spreading across the canvas and approaching abstraction. Its interlocking lines offer Hampson a way to consider Country as a system of interconnected relationships, while other works explore what happens when those structures come under strain. Strands of kelp bend and dance with tidal currents, extending Hampson’s exploration of reciprocity and interdependence. “Kelp forests demonstrate how life endures, not through containment, but through movement,” she says.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Firman Miranda

18/10/2026

NOW OPEN: MICHAEL DAVIS | ‘Street Choir II’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Street Choir II’, a new collection of three works by Eora/Sydney-based painter MICHAEL DAVIS, now on view and available to explore and acquire online.

Taking street trees as his subject, Davis attends to the forms that line neighbourhoods, occupy public parks and mark the edges of the built environment. He isolates each specimen, observing its peculiar structure and character, and gives it a distinct place within a larger visual order.

In the immense panel works that form ‘Street Choir II’, Davis’s subjects appear in carefully arranged rows against dark grounds, rendered with a graphic precision that recalls the conventions of botanical illustration. Titles, often wry or oblique, lend these portraits a further measure of individuality. Viewed from a distance, the forms resemble lines of notation in a musical score, their variations gathering into a collective rhythm.

Davis’s woodworking practice extends into the construction and treatment of his frames, which are integral to the works themselves. The pale timber provides a counterpoint to the dark grounds, its surfaces scored and punctured with intricate arrangements of dots. These marks evoke constellations, or the small symbols used to denote trees when seen from above, extending the paintings’ attention to each specimen into another visual register.

‘Street Choir II’ is the artist’s second collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands. Long fascinated by the individuality and peculiar dignity of trees, Davis invites us to look again at the ordinary landscapes we move through, finding unexpected beauty and humour in the natural forms that inhabit our streets, parks and suburban fringes.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Michael Davis

16/10/2026

NOW OPEN: GEORGIA PRICONE | ‘Still Here’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

This weekend at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, we are delighted to welcome a bouquet of elegantly composed, exquisitely realised oil paintings by GEORGIA PRICONE with the opening of ‘Still Here’. Now on view and available to explore online, this body of work finds the Naarm/Melbourne-based artist returning to the still-life genre with the sensitivity and technical assurance that distinguished her gallery debut in our 2023 group show ‘Botanica Vita’.

‘Still Here’ brings together flowers, glass vessels and white drapery in a series of vignettes informed by close observation. Here, languid folds of fabric in creamy alabaster tones set the stage for vivid red waratahs and coiling cymbidium orchids that send their branching stems and asymmetrical blooms beyond the neat contours of their containers.

“Rooted in the traditions of still-life painting, ‘Still Here’ explores the delicate relationship between presence, memory and impermanence,” says Pricone, whose exacting realism is tempered by an attunement to the quiet emotional pull of light, texture and shadow. “The serene beauty of still-life paintings, where nature is depicted in its fullest glory, serves as a gentle reminder of the temporality of life.”

Pricone’s glassware introduces a counterpoint of polished curves and ornament, while the cloth behind it falls into broad, sculptural folds. In its pale gradations of light and shadow, the drapery recalls the forms and materiality of classical sculpture, even as the flowers themselves offer a more ephemeral presence.

“Rather than seeking to dramatise their subjects, the works offer moments of stillness, encouraging the viewer to linger over the textures, light and delicate details of each arrangement,” says the artist. “The exhibition is a celebration of the ordinary act of noticing; a flower gathered from the garden, light falling across a familiar vessel, or an object carrying the memory of those who came before us.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

G E O R G I A

15/10/2026

NOW OPEN: IRENE CROWE | ‘Nocturne’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Nocturne’ – a sublime new suite of atmospheric landscapes by IRENE CROWE. Reflecting on memory, emotion and the places onto which we project our inner worlds, Crowe’s moody, meditative and romantic paintings see luminous skies unfold above terrain slowly abstracted by recollection, longing and the half-light of memory.

“This body of work continues my exploration of how our personal memories and cultural histories shape our experiences of landscapes,” says Crowe. “My work has always been a way for me to process emotions, often capturing the tenderness and nostalgia of a place visited on my travels or sometimes in dreams.”

Created amid a period of personal change, ‘Nocturne’ follows Crowe’s move from the Eora/Sydney home whose skies and harbour light had become embedded in her visual imagination. “This change was so rapid that I was only able to recognise it once we had already moved through it,” she says.

“These feelings intensified while I was going through ongoing challenges with fertility. Art-making became so important as I found myself thinking deeply about creation and how little control we sometimes have over the things we want most. These works do not seek to resolve that uncertainty, rather it became a place to hold the complexity.”

With ‘Nocturne’, Crowe’s immersion in the bush and littoral zones informs dreamy, gently enveloping scenes that hover between the observed and remembered – tinged with elemental drama and cohering through shifting cloudbursts of colour and light. “Each work evokes the tenderness and quiet melancholy of our connection to the places we inhabit, return to and come to know intimately,” says Crowe.

“For me, it is the depiction of skies that echo the surreal connection I have to my old home. While terrain remains abstracted, what emerges is a sense of nostalgia and transition which are subject to the memories of each viewer.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Irene Crowe

14/10/2026

“This suite of paintings comes from a time when I chose to remove myself from routine commitments to spend long stretches of time thinking, observing and hiking,” says Port Stephens-based artist and 2026 Hadley’s Art Prize finalist LINDA GREEDY of the seeds for her upcoming solo exhibition, ‘Wintering’ – opening next month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands and now available to preview by request. “Hiking and the landscape allow me to settle my mind, to recalibrate, providing me with the opportunity to explore visual and emotional inspiration – solitude, exposure, shelter and beauty.”

Painting on her travels across Tasmania, Greedy develops sprawling, densely worked scenes from the island’s exposed landscape, where the distinctive silhouettes of macrocarpa pines, long planted as windbreaks against its harsh conditions, stand sentinel across the terrain. ‘Wintering’ also introduces a new setting, equally one of remote extremes and sublime beauty: the Cape to Cape Track in the south-west of Western Australia.

“The track winds inland through dense coastal heath to intermittently emerge onto rugged, windblown granite headlands, affording spectacular views of remote beaches,” says Greedy. “Here, in WA, the native peppermint and melaleuca trees cling to the headlands, pruned and twisted sideways, holding out against the fierce Roaring Forties winds.”

Back home, Greedy draws on the scenery that surrounded her on these long expeditions, committing them to canvas. What was encountered almost incidentally on the trail is now examined, selected and resolved with a brush and oils. The meditative rhythm of walking gives way to the more demanding business of making a picture.

In addition to this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize, Greedy has previously been a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, Lethbridge 20,000 and Muswellbrook Art Prize. ‘Wintering’ is the artist’s third exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, after two warmly received showings in 2025 – each broader in scope and ambition than the last and both acquired in their entirety.

For previews, please email [email protected]

Linda Greedy

Michael Reid Southern Highlands

24/10/2026

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