Interior Landscapes

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to present our first solo exhibition by Eora/Sydney-based artist Tara Price – an ascendant voice in Australian landscape painting whose richly expressive, lushly textured impasto works attest to her formidable ambition and skill.

Price’s solo debut with the gallery, Interior Landscapes, is presented in partnership with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, where she previously exhibited her work – including an epic tapestry of tangled bush stretching 2.4 metres – in the group exhibition Placeheld. The artist now returns in her own right with a new collection of large-scale paintings that similarly thrust the viewer into the thick of the landscape, bringing into relief a wild abundance of overlapping flora via sculpted masses of paint that heave to the edge of the frame.

Moving from expansive terrain encountered on a trip to Western Australia to tighter glimpses of botanicals closer to home in Sydney’s Centennial Park, Interior Landscapes explores “the smaller moments that exist within a landscape – layers of leaves, grasses, flowers, rocks and trees that are often overlooked when viewing a place as a whole,” says Price, whose impasto approach affords these more intimate textural passages to coexist on canvas with a prevailing aura of heft, high drama and immersion. “Rather than focusing on broad vistas, these works look more closely at the details.”

Emotionally rooted in the landscape, Price’s paintings transcend description to become enveloping fields of textural topographies in miniature that slowly resolve into a dazzling whole. “Using thick layers of oil paint applied with a palette knife, I build surfaces where texture and colour work together to create the image,” says Price, who moves from fine, broken strokes for grasses and delicate foliage to broader, heavier markings for leaves, branches and rocks.

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