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.

South Australian contemporary sculptor and crochet maestro Trevor Smith makes his homecoming to Michael Reid Murrurundi this weekend with a houseful of woven wonders. Titled At Home with Trevor Smith, this vibrant new series immortalises a cornucopia of mid-century domestic icons – from lava lamps, radios and rotary phones to hairdryers, mixers and toasters – reimagining them as evocative, richly embellished soft sculptures in pure wool.

By transforming mass-produced objects into singular works of art and transposing homespun craft to the realm of soft sculpture, Smith upends distinctions between high and low taste with lashings of exuberance, camp irreverence and more than a soupçon of nostalgia, whimsy and wit.

Irrepressibly fun and rich with colour, Smith’s exquisitely crafted sculptures read like a 1950s Women’s Weekly cookbook come to life in fabulous fuzzy forms, stirring halcyon memories of classic suburban interiors and the design-led dreams of a more innocent time.

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

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

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to present a dazzling new painting exhibition from one of the major stars of the Michael Reid stable of represented artists: Troy Emery. Titled Big Volcano and staged against suitably poppy and transportive scenography, this explosive new series finds the celebrated Naarm/Melbourne-based artist returning to fabulous feline forms after the grand unveiling of his public sculpture commission Guardian Lion, which now soars above Melbourne Square in the city’s Southbank culture precinct.

At Murrurundi, mythic cats and other wild and whimsical creatures prowl across the artist’s canvases and climb the blush-pink postmodern playground in which they are displayed. This magnificent menagerie is complemented by nods to Wedgwood-style urns and other decorative vessels that evoke mythologies and allegorical imagery from antiquity, albeit with lashings of vibrant contemporary style.

Conjured in thick, impasto sweeps that lend each painting a sense of density, lustre, and sculptural heft, Emery’s vivid canvases sit in close dialogue with the soft-sculptural practice for which he is internationally acclaimed. “The paintings allow me to work more quickly and experiment with imagery and allegory. Both practices reflect on our relationship with the natural world, but painting offers a looser, more expressive way to explore these ideas. The colour choices are bold and immediate, echoing the visual intensity of my sculptural work.”

Big Volcano reflects Emery’s interest in the big cat myths tied to the Grampians and Blue Mountains. These folk-spun creatures – as well as the figure of the feral cat – are cast as “modern symbols of nature’s intangibility,” he says. “They, like the historical figures, are outsiders. The works represent an uneasiness about our place in history and our position both within and adjacent to the natural world.”

Works from Big Volcano can be viewed and acquired at the gallery, online or by emailing colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

In early July, Michael Reid Murrurundi will present our first solo exhibition from rising contemporary art star and National Emerging Art Prize finalist Heidi Lai. Titled Quiet Hours, the artist’s new series of oil paintings has now arrived at our Eora/Sydney gallery and can be previewed in person and by request.

“In our fast-paced world, moments of stillness have become rare treasures,” says Lai, whose streetscapes and interior scenes are brought to life with a beautiful balance of gauzy, wisp-like painterly gestures alongside areas of arresting and precisely rendered detail. “Quiet Hours captures these intimate pauses found in everyday life. Each canvas reveals the beauty in ordinary settings: kitchens, cafes and places where individuals pause, reflect and simply exist.”

Despite being environments where so many of us dwell in an increasingly urbanised contemporary Australia, these semi-public spaces are often eschewed in the popular artistic imagination in favour of domestic scenes or unspoilt landscapes. This makes Lai’s choice of subject feel immediately fresh and is, indeed, an enduring theme of her work, which draws the viewer’s focus towards overlooked or fleeting moments from our everyday reality and freezes flashes of memory with emotional resonance.

“Drawing inspiration from my upbringing in Hong Kong, a bustling metropolis, I quietly observe the interaction with humans and their surroundings,” says Lai, who has presented her work in solo and group shows in Australia and London and, in addition to her NEAP shortlisting, has been a finalist in the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition.

Lai describes the oil paintings of Quiet Hours as a celebration of the beauty of being present. “Each canvas reveals figures absorbed in their thoughts, creating a moment of stillness within bustling spaces,” she says. “They invite us to recognise the contemplative figures we encounter daily.”

To request a preview, secure an acquisition or book a private, in-person viewing at Michael Reid Sydney before the works travel to Murrurundi, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Melbourne/Naarm based painter Katie Daniels makes her Murrurundi Gallery debut in June 2025. Katie Daniels was a National Emerging Art Prize finalist in 2021 and was also an Art Gallery of New South Wales Wynne Prize finalist in 2018. The artist is currently exhibiting in the 2025  Salon Des Refusés exhibition at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, Sydney and has recently been named a finalist in the 2025 Georges River Art Prize.

A suite of the artist’s newest landscape paintings are on view at Murrurundi. This exhibition officially opens on June 12th, 2025. For a private preview of available painting please contact colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Brace yourself for the next solo exhibition from celebrated Armidale-based painter Jo White, who brings the foxy ladies of Fountain Lakes to Murrurundi with part 2 of her playful tribute to the beloved television comedy Kath & Kim.

Brought to life with White’s painterly panache, fabulous eye for detail and irreverent sense of yumour, part 2 of her Little Baby Cheeses series will be on view at Murrurundi from Wednesday 4th June.