Tamara Dean: The Early Years

We are thrilled to welcome a spectacular, large-scale survey of photographs from the first decade of leading Australian contemporary artist Tamara Dean‘s brilliant career.

Drawing together a selection of important, enduring and utterly bewitching images from several key bodies of work, Tamara Dean: The Early Years is the centrepiece of our winter program at Michael Reid Murrurundi and continues a series of museum-style presentations bringing work from the country’s most acclaimed contemporary artists to regional Australia.

All photographs selected for Tamara Dean: The Early Years are available to explore and acquire online and at the gallery, where the artist’s brooding, romantic and richly atmospheric visions are now playing out against tonal scenography that feels suitably moody and sumptuous.

The exhibition coincides with Dean’s showing in the world-famous French outdoor photography festival Photo La Gacilly and her first solo exhibition in the German capital, Supernatural, which is currently on view at Michael Reid Berlin and includes two never-before-seen releases.

It feels entirely fitting that we are now showing some of the most formative and influential works from Dean’s early career at a moment when her latest work is making its debut on the world stage. The thematic tendrils that wind through her practice today feel fabulously evident in the works selected for her Murrurundi show.

“Tamara Dean’s photography deftly explores the undercurrents of the human condition,” write the editors of her beautifully produced monograph, published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. “Her symbolically charged compositions of contemplative stillness and explosive action see humans intimately immersed in their surroundings: submerged in water, enmeshed in undergrowth, leaping from rock faces.”

These dreamlike entanglements of human and natural worlds are both visually captivating and tinged with urgency. “We have lost touch with the fact that we are animals,” writes Dean in the book’s introduction to her In Our Nature series, from which many works in her Murrurundi show derive. “We are a part of a living, breathing ecosystem that is much larger than ourselves – a system we have tipped completely off balance.”

We look forward to welcoming visitors to this world-class survey exhibition for one of the most influential photographic artists working in this country today.