Prelude

Michael Reid Murrurundi is delighted to announce ‘Prelude’, Sydney-based painter Irene Crowe’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, presented in partnership with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, where the artist has previously exhibited her work.

Across ‘Prelude’, Crowe pares the landscape back to a delicate, serpentine horizon, allowing expansive, roiling skies to become the true subject of each painting. Warm passages of peach, ochre and olive fold across the canvas, suggesting the lingering glow of golden hour 

Rather than recording the landscape as it is seen, in all its topographical specificity, Crowe paints what might be considered its emotional core: the mood and awe of being there, more indelibly inscribed in memory than the particulars of place itself.

“My work has always been a way for me to process emotions,” Crowe reflects, “often capturing the tenderness and nostalgia of a place visited either on my travels or sometimes in dreams.” That impulse found renewed significance following the birth of her first child and her family’s move from the Sydney home whose ever-changing skies had become a constant source of creative inspiration. “It suddenly dawned on me that we would never return to this place,” she writes, “and that I would never experience the beautiful skies and light I’d grown so familiar with.” 

Those luminous skies became both the emotional and formal centre of Prelude, serving, in the artist’s words, as “an archive of a home left behind.”