Michael Reid Sydney, 109 Shepherd Street, Sydney (2026)

11/06/2026

A dazzling floral dreamscape by acclaimed Australian artist TAMARA DEAN is the cover star of Aesthetica Magazine’s newly published June/July edition – landing on newsstands in the same week that her touring survey exhibition, Leave Only Footprints, is set to open at Manly Art Gallery and Museum.

“Dean turns the camera upon herself for High Jinks in the Hydrangeas, a series in which the Australian photomedia artist takes on the roles of director, subject and image-maker,” writes Eleanor Sutherland in a 12-page feature on Dean. “In some shots, her body is submerged within massive pink blooms. For others, she clings onto bending branches, seeming to defy gravity.”

Works from the same series – including the image now gracing Aesthetica’s cover – will be on view when Leave Only Footprints opens this Friday, 12 June, commencing with the launch event from 6pm. The first and most comprehensive career survey to date for one of the defining image-makers of her generation, Leave Only Footprints is presented by the Museum of Australian Photography and curated by MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea.

Incorporating scent, installation and video to create a space that engages the sensory spectrum, the exhibition traverses more than 11 key bodies of work that explore transitional moments in our lives – rites of passage, rituals, motherhood – all grounded by Dean’s desire to be within and to protect nature.

“For as long as I can remember, I have yearned to be in nature,” says Dean, who is also exhibiting at Liverpool Powerhouse as a finalist in the Blake Prize and has been selected for the Ravenswood Art Prize. “When I enter a forest, I feel as though I have come home.”

From earlier works that set their subjects’ startling beauty amid moody desuetude to more recent forays into fantasy via lush displays of cascading florals – as seen in Aesthetica – Leave Only Footprints traces the themes that have woven through Dean’s practice and offers a living testament to her evolving vision.

Thank you to . For enquiries, please email [email protected]

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11/06/2026

A towering forest of intricately painted larrakitj by DJIRRIRRA WUNUŊMURRA YUKUWA and MOYURRURRA WUNUŊMURRA will form a stunning centrepiece when the sisters’ joint exhibition opens this weekend at Michael Reid Sydney. Available to preview by request ahead of the official opening, this large-scale presentation connects the distinct yet deeply connected practices of two of the most exciting voices working today at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre at Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land.

While Djirrirra is rightly lauded, with her work shown in numerous presentations at our Eora/Sydney gallery, across Australia and abroad, her return marks the first major showing for her sister, Moyurrurra, who has continued working with the formal Dhaḻwaŋu iconography entrusted to her by the sisters’ father. In tracing their contrasting trajectories, the exhibition reveals a continuum between Yolŋu art’s contemporary and classical modes.

Across a celebrated career that has seen her included in Bundanon’s landmark ‘Miwatj Yolŋu – Sunrise People’ and her work acquired for international collections such as the Kluge-Ruhe in the United States, Djirrirra’s practice has been distinguished by the meeting of two visual languages: the diamond design that refers to freshwater fish traps, and the Yakuwa motif that speaks to her identity.

Her latest body of work finds her experimenting with salvaged metal road signs as a surface – and it proves a natural fit. The weathered ground echoes the undulating rhythms of her floral Yakuwa motif, while gleaming passages of exposed metal match the warm palette of her angular works on board.

While Djirrirra has garnered acclaim on the global stage, Moyurrurra has remained at her homeland at Gängan. “It would be predictable to see one sister as exciting and the other as traditional. But that is not how the work feels,” writes Will Stubbs in the show’s essay. “This is not rote repetition of well trodden themes but classical art at a high point. Her designs are best understood as classical rather than traditional.”

For previews, please email [email protected]

09/06/2026

COMING SOON: NICI CUMPSTON OAM | ‘Water Bodies’ | 3 July–30 August | Kingston Arts Centre

Barkandji artist, curator and educator NICI CUMPSTON OAM is one of six leading creative forces set to coalesce next month at Kingston Arts Centre in Moorabbin with ‘Water Bodies’ – an exhibition of contemporary First Peoples’ works exploring the preciousness of water amid climate change and its impact on Country and culture.

Displayed across the centre’s Outdoor Lightbox Gallery – open at all hours from next Tuesday, 16 June – ‘Attesting II’ comprises a selection of Cumpston’s hand-coloured photographic portraits of trees and significant sites within the backwaters and inland lake systems of the Barka (Murray) River.

“Our Barka is in crisis and every living being along this waterway is suffering,” says Cumpston of one such portrait, ‘Oh my Murray Darling’. “Our river is our livelihood and we rely on it to sustain us physically, emotionally and spiritually. Portraits of our precious trees and waterways are created to give them reverence and to provide an important platform to share stories of Aboriginal occupation and ongoing survival on our land.”

In 2025, Cumpston was named Director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia – an historic appointment that followed her 17 years at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where she was the inaugural Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, oversaw 16 major exhibitions and was the Tarnanthi Festival’s first Artistic Director.

“‘Oh my Murray Darling’ pays tribute to my ancestors who knew how to sustain our environment and to the hope that we can change this dire situation before it is too late,” says Cumpston, whose presence in ‘Water Bodies’ extends from the Outdoor Lightbox Gallery through to Kingston Arts Centre’s internal galleries, where she is joined by Judy Watson, Lisa Waup, Auntie Netty Shaw and more.

‘Water Bodies’ will be celebrated with an opening event on Thursday, 2 July, 6pm. To enquire about available works by Nici Cumpston OAM, please email [email protected]

08/06/2026

THIS WEEK: DJIRRIRRA WUNUŊMURRA YUKUWA & MOYURRURRA WUNUŊMURRA | ‘Classical’ | Opens Thursday, 11 June | Michael Reid Sydney

Opening this week at Michael Reid Sydney, ‘Classical’ brings together the distinct yet deeply connected practices of sisters DJIRRIRRA WUNUŊMURRA YUKUWA and MOYURRURRA WUNUŊMURRA – two major creative forces at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre at Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land.

While Djirrirra is firmly established as one of the most accomplished Yolŋu artists working today, with her work having been shown at our Eora/Sydney gallery and in numerous presentations abroad, her return marks the first significant showing for her sister, Moyurrurra, who has continued working with the formal Dhaḻwaŋu iconography entrusted to her by the sisters’ father. In tracing two artists’ contrasting trajectories, their joint exhibition reveals the continuum between Yolŋu art’s contemporary and classical modes.

Djirrirra’s practice is distinguished by the meeting of two visual languages. The diamond design that flourishes across her works depicts the waters surrounding her homeland and refers to freshwater fish traps, while the Yakuwa motif speaks directly to her identity. Her latest body of work finds her experimenting for the first time with salvaged road signs gleaned on Country – and the surface proves a natural fit. The reclaimed signs’ lightly weathered ground echoes the undulating rhythms of the artist’s flowering Yakuwa motif, while gleaming passages of exposed metal introduce rich amber tones that sit beautifully alongside the peachy ochre palette of her breathtaking diamond-patterned works on vast rhomboid boards.

While Djirrirra has continued to garner acclaim on the global stage, Moyurrurra has remained at the sisters’ homeland at Gängan. It might be tempting to interpret one sister’s work as innovative and the other’s as traditional, but that is not how Moyurrurra’s work feels. This is not rote repetition of well-trodden themes but classical art at a high point, rendered with extraordinary delicacy and intention.

For previews, please email [email protected]

04/06/2026

FINAL WEEK: TIM MAGUIRE | ‘Light Years’ | Until 6 June | Michael Reid Sydney

The first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney by TIM MAGUIRE, ‘Light Years’ is now entering its final days after a glittering run at the gallery. A landmark entry in the decades-spanning career of one of the most important and original voices in Australian art, this expansive constellation of new and historical paintings sees subjects that have loomed large in Maguire’s visual universe revisited, reimagined and realised anew.

In drawing together these deceptively disparate strands, ‘Light Years’ positions luminosity itself as the constant, animating force in Maguire’s ongoing exploration of the shifting tensions between surface and depth, abstraction and illusion.

While reaching back to the artist’s personal iconography, ‘Light Years’ eschews the logic of the retrospective – its imposition of a linear progression from one discrete period to the next – in favour of something fluid, recursive, cumulative and alive. Its collapsing of time hews closer to the plurality, simultaneity and multidirectional flow of ideas at play in the studio, where an artist’s roving curiosity and restless, rigorous experimentation see subjects surface, recede, overlap and reconfigure.

Working between Sydney and Mondenard, France, Maguire is globally celebrated for his cinematic, large-scale paintings that pull the viewer into a heightened field of looking. Applying the tricolour separation of printmaking to the lush materiality of oil on linen, he constructs his images from discrete, translucent, solvent-splashed layers that allow the whiteness of the ground to illuminate the surface from within.

“There’s a play between the illusion of the image and the physicality of the paint,” says Maguire. “The ideal painting for me is one where, up close, you see nothing but paint and process and layers, and then, from far enough away, the whole thing resolves into a convincing illusion.”

Michael Reid Sydney is open this Saturday from 11am to 3pm. For enquiries, please email [email protected]

03/06/2026

Ahead of the announcement of STEPHANIE TABRAM’s representation by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin, the gallery team visited the artist at her studio in New Norfolk, on the banks of the River Derwent in southeast Tasmania.

“It has become a daily meditation: observing the minutiae, the subtle changes, the passing seasons and the life and flow of the river itself,” says Tabram in our newly published profile. “After this time of reflection, I clock on – time in my studio is another day spent exploring what paint can do.”

Across a practice spanning more than three decades, Tabram has honed a singular approach to painting that reconciles the traditions of realism with the deeply felt, experiential understanding of place she describes above.

At once expansive and intricately detailed, her compositions unfold as complex visual fields in which light, atmosphere and texture are held in dynamic equilibrium. Sunlit foliage, silvery waterways and the brooding, gothic drama of Tasmanian skies are rendered through a meticulous process of layering in acrylic, built gradually with fine strokes into images that feel less like static views than cumulative stories.

Tabram deftly distils the simultaneity at play within the landscape – the way the day’s last light might momentarily set native grasses gilt-edged and aglow, even as roiling clouds gather above distant blue-grey ridgelines; the faceted interplay of steep escarpments and sprawling pastoral plains, carved with shadows and compressed into an arresting pictorial plane; the glittering blaze of autumn foliage or weeping, wintry trees doubled and transformed in the river’s cool reflections.

The result is a dazzling tapestry of place, where multiple temporal and atmospheric experiences are suspended on canvas and coalesce into one complete and richly absorbing scene. “The river carries this country’s DNA,” says Tabram in our profile – link in bio.

To sign up for first access to the artist’s forthcoming projects, including her first solo exhibition with the gallery, slated for next year, please email [email protected]

Portraits by Rosie Hastie |

01/06/2026

Congratulations to PETRINA HICKS, who has been named a finalist in the 2026 Abbotsleigh Grace Cossington Smith Art Award for her 2025 work ‘Mnemosyne VIII’.

First presented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin at Sydney Contemporary 2025 – with remaining editions of the work available by request – ‘Mnemosyne VIII’ will be on view at Abbotsleigh’s Grace Cossington Smith Gallery when the exhibition of finalists opens on Saturday, 18 July, ahead of the awards announcement on 22 July.

“In ‘Mnemosyne VIII’, the relationship between human and fish is not depicted as hierarchical or separate,” says Hicks, who instead evokes a quiet coexistence and a sense of shared consciousness – ideas that resonate with the theme of the awards program: ‘Making Connections’. “The title, referencing the Greek goddess of memory, deepens this connection by implying the bond between humans and animals is not only physical but embedded in a collective or ancestral memory.”

Selected as a finalist by MCA curator Anna Davis and Artbank’s Barry Keldoulis, the artist says her work encourages a reconsideration of human identity, suggesting that “our connection to the animal world is not distant or separate, but intimate, enduring, and deeply embedded within who we are.”

Across a career spanning more than two decades, Hicks has honed her singular style and cemented her place at the forefront of her field. The news of her latest shortlisting comes in the same week that an edition of an earlier work – the seminal ‘Shenae and Jade’, 2005, also presenting a striking encounter between human and animal subjects – achieved a landmark result at auction.

The subject of several institutional surveys, her works are lensed with a heightened, almost hyperreal precision, subverting the coolly seductive language of advertising while drawing motifs from classical myth, folklore and art history. With ‘Mnemosyne VIII’, Hicks suggests that beneath the surface of a highly controlled human identity lies an instinctual core that connects us to the animal world.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]
hicks

01/06/2026

Works by Eora/Sydney-based artists LINDE IVIMEY and PETRINA HICKS offer striking points of focus inside this beautifully appointed terrace home by interior designer Anna-Carin McNamara of Anna Carin Design – published today in The Design Files.

“The goal wasn’t to impose a particular style, but to create an atmosphere,” writes Bea Taylor in TDF’s story on the project, dubbed The Atrium by its designer. “A home that felt luminous, personal and quietly layered enough to hold the couple’s extensive collection of art, furniture and ceramics gathered across years of living internationally.”

“The Atrium began as a very ordinary 1990s townhouse in Alexandria that had been rented out for the past ten years and was visibly tired,” says McNamara. “Its one true asset was a central atrium that pulls daylight deep into the plan. The strategy was simple. Let that light lead, and make every decision answer to it.”

This same sense of luminosity is evident in the photographs of Petrina Hicks, whose recent work ‘Mnemosyne V’ – which originally debuted in Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s 2025 Sydney Contemporary presentation – is a beguiling presence in the master bedroom, offering a sense of continuity with two much earlier works by the artist – ‘Zara I’ and ‘II’ from her seminal 2005 ‘Untitled’ series – displayed elsewhere in the home. Downstairs, Linde Ivimey’s 2025 sculpture ‘HOPE’ in cascading strands of snow-white acrylic is positioned beside the dining table beneath the project’s titular atrium. Swipe to see these works in situ.

Thank you to , and interior stylist Claire Delmar of Studio CD for featuring work by Linde Ivimey and Petrina Hicks in this beautiful space. To enquire about the artists’ available work, please email [email protected]

Photographs by Anson Smart |
Styling by Claire Delmar |
hicks

01/06/2026

Congratulations to TAMARA DEAN, who has been announced as a finalist in the 2026 Abbotsleigh Grace Cossington Smith Art Award for her work ‘Endless Summer’, which forms part of her forthcoming series, ‘The Garden’.

“When life feels overwhelming, I turn to the garden as a space where my body meets and responds to the living environment around me,” says Dean of her shortlisted work, which was selected for the prize’s third edition by guest judges Anna Davis, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Artbank’s Barry Keldoulis. “Rather than a passive refuge, it becomes a dynamic field of encounter shaped through touch, duration, and sensory attunement.”

This marks the third major prize shortlisting for a work from ‘The Garden’, with select photographs from the same series also featured on the shortlists for this year’s Blake Prize and Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. Two additional works from ‘The Garden’ were presented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin at the Aotearoa Art Fair last month, with editions currently available to acquire online or by request. ‘The Garden’ will ultimately be shown in its entirety when Dean presents her next solo exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney in early 2027.

“The human figure is situated within, rather than apart from, the landscape,” says Dean, whose Abbotsleigh nod comes a week from the opening of her touring career retrospective ‘Leave Only Footprints’ at Manly Art Gallery and Museum.

“The garden emerges as both testing ground and collaborator, where boundaries between self and landscape dissolve. These works explore connection as something embodied and contingent, emerging through vulnerability, participation, and an ongoing entanglement with the living world.”

‘Endless Summer’ will be on view when the exhibition of finalists opens on Saturday, 18 July, ahead of the awards presentation on Wednesday, 22 July, where the recipients of the $35,000 prize pool will be announced.

To register your interest in Tamara Dean’s forthcoming series, ‘The Garden’, please email [email protected]

28/05/2026

COMING SOON: DJIRRIRRA WUNUŊMURRA YUKUWA & MOYURRURRA WUNUŊMURRA | ‘Classical’ | 11–28 June | Michael Reid Sydney

Michael Reid Sydney will soon present a major exhibition by Yolŋu artists DJIRRIRRA WUNUŊMURRA YUKUWA and MOYURRURRA WUNUŊMURRA, sisters and leading creative voices at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land. Bringing together two distinct yet deeply connected practices, their joint exhibition can now be previewed by request.

It is almost 20 years since Djirrirra won the Northern Territory Contemporary Art Award and nearly 30 years since the monumental bark painting she worked on alongside her father, Yaŋgarriny Wunuŋmurra, won First Prize at the 1997 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. And it is exactly 80 years since that same father was photographed at a larrakitj ceremony at Yirrkala, interring the bones of a deceased clan member within a richly painted memorial pole destined to return to the earth.

This is a vivid example of the bifocal nature of Yolŋu art and culture, where designs can embody contemporary practice and ancient spiritual observance at once. ‘Classical’ binds these threads together: two sisters, daughters of the same father, trace distinct artistic trajectories in the realm between classical and contemporary expression.

Djirrirra has exhibited extensively across Australia and internationally. ‘Classical’, however, is the first show in her own right for her sister. While Djirrirra is lauded for extending the visual language of Yolŋu art into new terrain, Moyurrurra has remained at her homeland at Gängan, working within the formal Dhaḻwaŋu iconography passed down by their father.

It might be easy to frame one practice as innovative and the other as traditional. Yet Moyurrurra’s art resists such a distinction. Hers are works of remarkable delicacy and authority – classical art rendered at an exceptionally high level. What unites their work is extraordinary discipline and finesse – the kind of devotion demanded by sacred cultural knowledge.

For previews, please email [email protected]

Michael Reid Sydney

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