Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to announce the imminent arrival of our second solo exhibition by Eora/Sydney-based painter Heidi Lai. Titled Stillness, the artist’s forthcoming series can be previewed by request and arrives after her celebrated and highly successful solo debut, Quiet Hours, which followed her breakout showing as a finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize.

Stillness announces a broadening of scope and ambition for Lai’s practice, while furthering her ongoing explorations of presence, pause and the emotional texture of life through her softly expressive and richly evocative urban scenes. Set within cafés, streets and restaurants, Stillness turns its attention to moments that “often go unnoticed in our everyday lives”.

In these intimate yet softly cinematic city moments, the artist captures “the delicate balance between movement and pause,” allowing time to slow as ordinary gestures – sitting, standing, drinking, watching – become meditations on human connection. “Through subtle light and expressive brushwork,” she says, the paintings reveal “the transient atmosphere of everyday moments.”

These moments materialise through a distinctive painterly language that moves between areas of keenly observed detail and atmospheric flashes of fluid colour – like flickering memories from a flâneuse’s city wanderings, frozen streetscapes glimpsed through a rain-streaked window or darkened, brass-clad brasserie interiors steeped in a filmic haze.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Lai’s practice is shaped by the rhythm and density of city life. “Growing up in the bustling city of Hong Kong shaped the way I observe the world,” she says. “I quietly watch the subtle interactions between people and their surroundings, often questioning whether the pace of modern life leaves us too distracted to be truly present.” Working in oil, her expressive brushstrokes evoke movement and memory, distilling fleeting experiences into scenes rich with emotional resonance and romance.

“Through my art, I encourage people to pause, look at our surroundings, and appreciate the significance of the ordinary moment,” says Lai, whose works will be available to preview and acquire by request and at our Eora/Sydney gallery before they travel to Murrurundi next month.

For enquiries, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

Two of today’s most original, influential and acclaimed interpreters of the Australian landscape – Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury-based painter Julz Beresford and West Australian artist Carly Le Cerf – will join forces at Michael Reid Murrurundi in May for the gallery’s large-scale exhibition Between Dust & Rain.

Between Dust and Rain will place new bodies of work by Beresford and Le Cerf in a compelling conversation, with their distinct painterly preoccupations hewing to the vivid contrasts of our continent: the sunburnt red centre and the alpine sweeps that cling to the coast.

From Beresford’s monumental, atmospheric renderings of Snowy Mountains bluffs and the brooding Hawkesbury waterways that snake through the area’s tangled bushland to Le Cerf’s epic topographic portraits of endless, ochre-tinged plains, Between Dust and Rain is a celebration of the Australian landscape from two leading artists for whom immersion in nature is a grounding force for both their creative process and their emotional lives.

For early previews, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

The latest solo exhibition from Orange-based artist Esther Eckley, Harbouring Light is now open at Michael Reid Murrurundi – offering a dazzling escape onto Sydney Harbour and bringing bursts of luminosity to the gallery. In this radiant new series, the artist turns her gaze to the city’s glittering bays and inlets, where bobbing sailboats drift through impasto seas and sun-struck skies.

Sweeps of sky blue, milky white and pretty sorbet tones are laid on thick with palpable energy, capturing the intensity of light in the warmer months – that almost blinding daze when water, sky and city seem to shimmer into one.

A celebration of the salubrious pleasures of summer by the sea, Eckley’s new paintings hover between observation and sensation, distilling harbourside vistas into richly textured fields of colour and light. Lighthouses and other landmarks appear as if glimpsed through sun-glare on the water, inviting viewers to linger in the heat-hazed, salt-tinged atmosphere of a perfect day in the Harbour City.

For enquiries, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

Armidale NSW based painter Jo White returns to the Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre in December with her newest concept exhibition, I Made You A Mix Tape. Brought to life with her signature graphic style, vibrant palette and irreverent sense of humour, this musically informed collection of paintings borrow from the titles of our most beloved and enduring pop-bops.

With I Made You A Mix Tape, Jo White has created a multi-sensory gamified exhibition experience that will be soundtracked in the gallery by the very songs that have inspired her newest works. Visitors can relish in the guessing-game joy of identifying song titles in her double entendre painted pictures, while delighting in the bemusement of her exquisite painted bronze trompe l’oeil sculptures. Frosty schooners, jukebox coins and discarded packets of Nobby’s Nuts will punctuate the exhibition space, bringing Jo White’s nostalgic wit into three-dimensional form.

Paintings and sculptures from this exhibition are now available to preview by request. Please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au for information.

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to welcome back Tarntanya/Adelaide-based contemporary painter Jessie Feitosa with her first solo presentation in almost two years, a dazzling series of still lifes and portraits with the suitably sanguine title Overly Lovely. Feitosa’s show serves up a delightful summer banquet of simple morsels, festive tipples and lush florals – all rendered in warm, bright tones and a striking graphic style that brings contemporary verve to the still-life genre.

With their clean lines softened by washes of natural light and poppy pastels offset by glamorous burgundies, the artist’s elegant compositions feel redolent of languorous days filled with long, rambling lunches that stretch effortlessly into aperitivo hour amid a whirl of laughter, conversation and music. We look forward to welcoming visitors to Overly Lovely by Jessie Feitosa – a beautiful new exhibition that feels perfectly tuned to holiday mode and alive with the season’s ebullience, conviviality and hearty abundance.

For enquiries, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

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.

For enquiries, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

Naarm/Melbourne-based contemporary painter Stacey McCall returns to Michael Reid Murrurundi with Lucent, a sublime new collection of still-life paintings that flowered from the sketchbooks she kept during an extended sojourn in the City of Light. Titled after the gorgeous, gauzy glow that washes through each picture and lights up her elegant, effortlessly arranged accoutrements and tableware, the series sees McCall hone a softly expressive painterly language rooted in tonal underpainting.

“The basis of my work has always been the tonal underpainting, with layers of translucent pigment allowing those initial marks to glow through,” says McCall. “Lucent explores that process even more, focusing on light and colour while referencing the many sketches I did on my travels this year.”

Evoking the essence of her still-life objects with an economy of graceful gestures and pared-back textural markings that emerge through clouds of earthy, peachy tones, McCall’s deceptively simple, deftly realised style feels perfectly attuned to the warm insouciance and easy eclecticism of the Parisian pied-à-terre she temporarily called home. The result is a luminous body of work that expands her distinctive and richly evocative approach to the still-life genre, allowing the cumulative impact of her handmade objects and artfully undone florals and fruit to conjure a familiar yet faraway mood.

For enquiries, please email amandamackinlay@michaelreid.com.au

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