Following her celebrated debut at Michael Reid Murrurundi, Yan Guo’s second full-scale exhibition marks an exciting evolution in the Shanghai-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist’s distinctive graphic style.

Sharpening her striking juxtaposition of painterly approaches, Guo sets silhouetted figures engaged in sporting pursuits against airbrushed, pattern-like fields of abstracted florals. Pole-vaulters arc, wrestlers embrace and sprinters are caught mid-stride as the clash of painterly techniques skews spatial perspective – flattening athletic or childlike subjects at play against soft-focus grounds.

Rich in colour and optical play, the paintings compress pictorial depth into vivid, pastel-neon planes, extending Guo’s signature oscillation between airbrush and brush into a lively study of strength, grace and the spaces we move through.

Simone Hale returns to Michael Reid Murrurundi with her second solo exhibition, Abundance – a painterly celebration of home comforts that feels serendipitously timed for spring and arrives after her warmly received late-summer debut.

Painted during the last chapters of life in her rambling New England home, these intimate works sit between interior and still life: flowers and fruit appear heaped together with effortless elegance, utilitarian vessels are arrayed on hearty kitchen tables, and rooms steeped in soft, natural light enclose timeworn pieces that gesture to past lives. Eclectic vintage frames extend each scene, lending old-world charm, like windows onto a bygone season and simpler times. “If abundance is the opposite of scarcity, then it is the perfect word to describe the last 22 years of life in our old house,” says Hale, who notes each understated scene as being “part of the abundance of our everyday.”

For acquisition enquiries please contact amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

Fiona Smith returns to Michael Reid Murrurundi with a brilliant suite of portraits that set Australian native birds amid pattern-rich interiors, where clashing motifs amplify her subjects’ plumage and personality. Richly layered, sumptuously detailed and bursting with colour, the works revel in theatrical poise as regal sitters strike dramatic poses against intricately ornamented backdrops in an exuberant collision of rococo décor and natural drama. Building on the strength of her previous exhibitions – all immediate hits with collectors – Smith’s new series sharpens her signature blend of charisma, wit and decorative verve.

Paintings from this exhibition are now available to preview at Michael Reid Murrurundi. Please contact amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au for acquisition enquiries.

One of the most beloved names in the Michael Reid Murrurundi stable, Narrabri-based contemporary painter Brooke Dalton is back with a new collection of paintings celebrating the quiet pleasures of springtime at home. Interiors layered with vibrant books, collected curios, painted ceramics and tangles of fresh-cut flowers spilling from shelves are rendered with Dalton’s loose, energetic brushwork and a decorator’s eye. This new series offers fresh perspectives on stylish living rooms and reading nooks where clothbound tomes, pattern-rich décor and beautiful blooms converge in a joyful palette of fresh greens, petrol blues and rosy pinks. With a sense of warm nostalgia and lashings of joie de vivre, these spirited interior vignettes revel in eccentric whimsy, bohemian insouciance and more-is-more abundance.

For assistance with an acquisition please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

We are delighted to welcome Cindy Tong back to Michael Reid Murrurundi after her immensely successful, sold-out solo exhibition earlier this year. The Gippsland-based ceramic artist returns with a stunning new collection of elegantly crafted and beautifully textured vessels titled Bloom. Drawing on native flora and geological forms, Tong’s Bloom vessels marry Mishima and sgraffito linework with micro-crystal glazes and moments of raw clay, resulting in intricate surface effects and richly compelling forms that distil fleeting moments in nature and reward slow, attentive looking.

Laura White brings her spring garden indoors with a sublime new suite of still-life oil paintings that celebrate the season’s easy abundance. Gorgeous profusions of magnolias, nasturtiums and camellias tumble from hand-painted ceramic vessels, while timeworn bowls of pears, figs and artichokes anchor intimate interior vignettes that evoke the effortless pleasures of home. Rendered in layered oils for tonal depth and lustre, and animated by an exquisite interplay of light and shadow, the paintings comprising In Full Bloom glow with ripened colour and laid-back elegance – florals to live with this season.

Please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au for acquisition enquiries.

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to present our collaborative exhibition Pied-à-terre. This ambitious project places exceptional new and collectable work by more than 25 leading contemporary artists in conversation with a curated selection of beautifully restored, finely crafted mid-century furniture from the collection of Eora/Sydney design specialist Zander & Co.

Our art-meets-design display unfolds as a sequence of immersive, evocatively layered living room vignettes, all staged within the Murrurundi gallery. While many featured artists’ works reflect expansive notions of home or present painterly scenes attuned to the gentler rhythms of the interior domain, the richly imagined scenography of Pied-à-terre is itself a paean to the pleasures of home – to the idea of art and design as embedded within an elevated vision of the domestic everyday.

A celebration of creative cross-pollination and the blurring of old boundaries between disciplines, Pied-à-terre reflects our growing desire to experience art and design objects in spaces that tell a story – eclectic, emotionally charged and mood-setting environments that hint at the idiosyncratic collecting tastes of the people who might live there. It’s a sensibility that similarly guides Amelia Zander of Zander & Co. and is on full display in her hybrid showroom, workshop and family home in Sydney’s Inner West.

“I think visitors actually enjoy seeing the furniture in a real home,” she says in a profile published by The Murrurundi Argus in the lead-up to the opening of Pied-à-terre. “It helps them imagine how the pieces might work in their own lives. There’s something nice about the overlap, letting the furniture be lived with, not just displayed.” Read the full story here.

Alongside Zander & Co.’s design pieces, Pied-à-terre assembles works by a stellar line-up of contemporary art stars – including many of the most acclaimed and in-demand names from the stable of artists represented by our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery. In Pied-à-terre, home is where the art is – and every element of the exhibition’s styled room sets is available to acquire, both in the gallery and online.

To discuss works from the series, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to present a dazzling new solo exhibition from one of the most admired and in-demand names in our roster of regular exhibitors, Louise Frith, who returns to the gallery with the evocatively titled Tendrils and Tapestries.

Building on the creative breakthrough of her widely celebrated solo show Understory – as well as her collaboration with fashion brand Nancy Bird, which saw her elegant flannel flowers and other painted botanicals transposed onto textiles – Tendils and Tapestries displays a dazzling profusion of native wildflowers that teem and tangle right to the edge of each canvas.

Moving with painterly gusto between areas of intricate and tightly controlled detail and an overall mood of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s Tendrils and Tapestries series takes us deeper into the thickets of the bushland covering Eora/Sydney North Head. Sketching in the field before returning to her painting studio, Frith observes and translates the area’s dense botanical interplay, seasonal shifts and the filtered patterns of light and shade cast across the forest floor.

Frith’s paintings can be read less as conventional landscapes than as exuberant, impressionistic fields of pattern-like flora that envelop and transport the viewer. Each work is at once precisely rendered and yet almost verging on abstraction in its overlapping forms and immersive, optically charged, tapestry-like effects.

To discuss works from Tendrils and Tapestries by Louise Frith, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au