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.

Michael Reid Murrurundi is pleased to announce that highly acclaimed contemporary artist, Gaypalani Wanambi will contribute to our inaugural collaborative exhibition with R. M.Williams, Land and People.

Raised in a distinguished artistic lineage led by her father, the renowned Mr Wanambi, Gaypalani Wanambi carries forward a legacy of cultural innovation. Before his death, Mr Wanambi extended his artistic practice into digital media and engravings on salvaged metal ­– part of the Found movement, which embraced industrial materials as artistic medium, especially among artists in Northeast Arnhem Land.

Under her father’s mentorship, Wanambi developed a visual language deeply rooted in Yolnu philosophy. Her intricate engravings on repurposed road signs and scrap metal serve as a tribute to the ancestral songlines of her Marrakulu clan ancestral being, Wuyal.

Working from the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, Wanambi is now the leading female practitioner within the Found movement, which sees roadside material gleaned on Country repurposed as shimmering, intricately detailed works of art.

Recently named as a finalist in the 2023 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) – Australia’s most prestigious and enduring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art prize – Wanambi’s participation in Land and People feels vital, serving as an arresting homage to rural and Country identity.

Artworks by Gaypalani Wanambi are available to preview at our Sydney Gallery and appointments may be scheduled by request. For more information, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Murrurundi is pleased to introduce Jill Daniels, whose dynamic and high-energy rodeo-themed paintings illuminate a striking fusion between First Nations cultural practice and contemporary life in rural communities. Her optically charged compositions pulsate with a rural optimism, serving as an ode to life in Country, where contemporary rural traditions like rodeo intersect with First Nations cultural narratives.

Her vibrant feature in the upcoming RM Williams exhibition exemplifies her spirited visual language – unapologetically bright and compositionally abundant – evoking the heat and the dynamism of remote community life.

Based in Ngukurr, a remote community on the banks of the Roper River in southern Arnhem Land, Daniels has been refining her practice since 2003. A sister to acclaimed artist Amy Johnson, she continues to shape a distinctive visual language that speaks to the vitality and complexity of her rural environment.

As well as experimenting with linocuts and screen prints, Jill enjoys painting with acrylic paints. Her subjects are predominately landscapes and rural themes, and her ability to bring out the vibrant colours of the relevant habitat has captured the imagination of fabric manufacturers, as her paintings translate well to fabric, leading to several partnerships in this area.

Paintings by Jill Daniels are available to preview at our Sydney Gallery and appointments may be scheduled by request. For more information, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au