Stacey McCall returns to Murrurundi with a quietly sublime new collection of still life paintings. Titled Breathwork, the artist’s new series assembles elegantly pared-back paintings that gesture towards abstraction.

“I love the idea that my work comes from a calm consciousness of breathing slowly” the artist recently told  arts writer Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen in a profile published in the latest issue if Art Guide Australia. “I approach painting with a fairly gentle touch”

Breathwork is paired with our latest Michael Reid Clay exhibition, Shelf Life by Cathy McMichael.

For acquisition assistance please contact: colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Joseph McGlennon possesses an entirely original visual language. He trained, in his youth, at the National Art School before venturing into the creative world of international business. Back on his art tools, later if life, McGlennon came to each series with ideas and images fully formed and mature. There was no undergraduate angst. His inaugural solo exhibition, Strange Voyage, in 2011, established visual, aesthetic and curatorial benchmarks and parameters that have influenced every subsequent artwork and series. The consistent quality of his creative output is exceptional.

Strange Voyage delved into the historical reality of the 19th century when a mob of kangaroos were shipped to Kew Gardens in London. The royal family just loved wild animals besporting themselves in the gardens for their pleasure. The kangaroos froze to death. The underlying philosophical theme of the exhibition was the notion that some things simply cannot be uprooted and transplanted culturally.

McGlennon’s photographs are beautiful, their message subtly powerful. Upon winning the most prestigious photography prize in the country, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, in 2015, artist and judge Bill Henson commented on McGlennon’s practice, stating, “The work has an almost anonymous perfection that reinforces the fact that culture is never outside nature.”

Numerous articles have been dedicated to the hundreds of individual images captured with McGlennon’s Hasselblad camera – to make a single artwork – which are skilfully woven together to narrate his poignant stories. The power of his unrivalled skills is without question. Many now blatantly copy McGlennon’s style. However, the flattery of imitation to one side, it is the ever-roving and evolving scope of McGlennon’s practice that simply defies his peers.

With his Murrurundi exhibition, McGlennon wanted his new kangaroos to find expression outside of a metropolitan space, for the work to ground its paws in the very soil of regional Australia. McGlennon’s new series, Leap, captures kangaroos mid-air, symbolising resilience against wild colonial hunting dogs. The dogs remain just out of frame, but their urgency and presence can be sensed through their dynamic leap of the kangaroo.

These creatures embody untamed beauty, reflecting the unwavering spirit of the Australian wilderness. Their sinuous form becomes a living poem of fluid motion. Inspired by the ecological dance between predator and prey, Leap explores the delicate balance within this unique ecosystem. It invites reflection on the human impact that is still needed for conservation in today’s fragile Australia.

For Australian acquisitions please contact danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au
For European acquisitions  please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Now cascading across the gallery walls at Michael Reid Murrurundi is the latest series of charismatic soft sculptures spun by South Australian artist and crochet virtuoso Trevor Smith.

Our exhibition space has been dazzlingly recast as a theatrical stage for Smith’s colourful cast of characters, all woven with pure wool yarn, a dash of whimsy and an eye for the telling details that animate each figure and sketch out their persona.

From butchers, bakers, bellhops and beauty queens to farmers, flamenco dancers and yeomen of the guard, the show’s fabulous chorus of appealingly offbeat actors plays up Smith’s wonderfully eccentric style, infectious wit and singular mastery of the crochet medium.

With its title, Mugshots, reflecting the artist’s acute distillation of each character’s profile, this kaleidoscopic display feels like a sprawling social novel sprung to life through a playful taxonomy of archetypes – albeit with a few fantastical creatures in the mix.

This is the artist’s first exhibition since his major museum survey at The Riddoch Arts & Cultural Centre in 2023. We look forward to welcoming visitors to the gallery to enter the vibrant world of Trevor Smith’s Mugshots. All works are available to view and acquire online.

Sydney artist Louise Frith returns to Murrurundi with a spectacular new series of nature studies that dazzlingly dial up the immersive qualities of her painted worlds.

Delving deep into the thickets of Australian native bush, Understory sees a profusion of wildflowers extend right to the edge of Frith’s canvas, allowing her paintings to feel less like conventional landscapes than a rich and tangled field of abstracted flora that envelopes and transports the viewer.

“Understory has a dual meaning to me,” says the artist, who spent many hours during the last 12 months at Sydney’s North Head observing the interplay of plant life, its seasonal shifts and the dappled light and shade filtering down to the underbrush. “There is the literal layer of vegetation under trees, but also the story of renewal, emergence and growth that is symbolic of life all around us.”

These bursts of plant life are rendered with the artist’s signature painterly style, which displays a skilful entanglement of intricate precision and expressive flourish. Understory is at once a culmination of the artist’s celebrated practice to date and an exciting progression as she moves into more impressionistic, expansive, optically charged terrain.

“When I am immersed in the landscape of North Head, all my senses are fully engaged,” says Frith. “There are the sounds of birds and insects, honey-scented flora, a layered visual carpet of vegetation that sometimes looks like jewels in the landscape. It is a place to be lost in.”

Chelsea Gustafsson is back to Murrurundi with a special release of new painting.

Building on the success of her most recent body of work – in which old chairs salvaged from roadside cleanups were dazzlingly recast as the stars of hyper-detailed, highly cinematic still-life miniature paintings – Glimpse pushes the artist’s subject and approach even further into playful and beguiling territory.

Interested in still life’s storytelling possibilities – the alchemy of objects staged in dynamic sculptural arrangements – Gustafsson has amassed a passionate following with her extraordinarily detailed, small-scale paintings rendered with realist precision and filmic panache.

With Glimpse, the artist brings an extra dimension to her still-life tableaux, toying with perspective, framing and scale and layering pictures within pictures. Collaged in space, these compositions read as tiny trompe l’oeil – fabulously deceptive with almost nesting-doll effects and endlessly fascinating to peer into.

Maker Unknown.
32-star American flag, 1858-59
large hand-sewn linen flag
2640 x 1350 mm (8 feet 8 inches x 4 feet 5 inches)
Framed
$25,000

Provenance
David Spode (1936 – 2013), antiquarian book collector.
Douglas Stewart Fine Books, Melbourne
Michael Reid, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

The Pre-Civil War Flag has been additionally authenticated by Mr. John Hays, Head of American Furniture & Decorative Arts, Christie’s America, September 2014

Each of the 13 stripes being a separate piece of fabric, with 32 hand-sewn and individually appliquéd stars configured in four aligned rows of eight on the canton, the hoist edge stencilled 3 yd [i.e. yard] American. The opposite edge with a small silk label stitched on inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand ‘Scriven’ (possibly the name of the owner), some loss at lower right edge and scattered small perforations and mothing, but overall in a good state of preservation, a scarce example of this flag which was in official use for only a year between July 1858 and July 1859, following the admission of Minnesota to the Union (May 1858) and prior to the granting of statehood to Oregon (February 1859).

In the pre-Civil War period, American flags were made almost exclusively for public use, a fact which contributes to the rarity of this flag. However, although the 32-star flag was officially obsolete well before the first shots of the war in April 1861, examples would most certainly have been carried into battle by Union regiments.

32-star American flags are rare. This is largely because they were only official for one year (1858-59), but it is also a result of the fact that this time frame occurred prior to the Civil War, in an era when use of the Stars & Stripes was not used on private land. Flags were becoming popular in political campaigning, but their use had yet to be widespread in the display of general patriotism.

Minnesota joined the Union as the 32nd state on May 11th, 1858. The 32-star flag became official on July 4th of that year and remained so until July 3rd of 1859. Since Oregon joined the Union on February 14th, 1859, however, production of 32-star flags probably ceased well before July. For this reason, the 32-star count likely saw use for only 9 months. This made it one of the shortest-lived flags in early America.