Tendrils and Tapestries

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