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Michael Reid Southern Highlands, 11b Old Hume Highway, Berrima (2026)

19/10/2026

THIS WEEK: MIRANDA HAMPSON | ‘Esoteric Lore’ | 22 October–22 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands & Northern Beaches

Opening online and at Michael Reid Southern Highlands this Thursday, 22 October, ‘Esoteric Lore’ marks the arrival of the most ambitious body of work to date by Dharawal-based Anaiwan artist MIRANDA HAMPSON. Presented in two chapters across our Berrima and Brookvale spaces, the exhibition will continue next week at Michael Reid Northern Beaches, with its second opening on Thursday, 29 October.

A finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Hampson made her Berrima debut with a sold-out collection of paintings in our 2025 group exhibition ‘Lookaftering’, followed by ‘Vantage’, a paired presentation with PETA WEST that was also acquired in its entirety. This impressive momentum has continued over the past 12 months with recognition in the Hadley’s Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and Mosman Art Prize, where she received the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award.

Hampson’s practice entwines remarkable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in materiality, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, fine painted marks accumulate into intricate woven forms, filaments and rippling fields, giving surfaces a quality at once organic, densely layered and impossibly weightless.

Throughout the series, the fishing net provides a central image – sometimes suspended against a neutral ground, elsewhere spreading across the canvas and approaching abstraction. Its interlocking lines offer Hampson a way to consider Country as a system of interconnected relationships, while other works explore what happens when those structures come under strain. Strands of kelp bend and dance with tidal currents, extending Hampson’s exploration of reciprocity and interdependence. “Kelp forests demonstrate how life endures, not through containment, but through movement,” she says.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Firman Miranda

18/10/2026

NOW OPEN: MICHAEL DAVIS | ‘Street Choir II’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Street Choir II’, a new collection of three works by Eora/Sydney-based painter MICHAEL DAVIS, now on view and available to explore and acquire online.

Taking street trees as his subject, Davis attends to the forms that line neighbourhoods, occupy public parks and mark the edges of the built environment. He isolates each specimen, observing its peculiar structure and character, and gives it a distinct place within a larger visual order.

In the immense panel works that form ‘Street Choir II’, Davis’s subjects appear in carefully arranged rows against dark grounds, rendered with a graphic precision that recalls the conventions of botanical illustration. Titles, often wry or oblique, lend these portraits a further measure of individuality. Viewed from a distance, the forms resemble lines of notation in a musical score, their variations gathering into a collective rhythm.

Davis’s woodworking practice extends into the construction and treatment of his frames, which are integral to the works themselves. The pale timber provides a counterpoint to the dark grounds, its surfaces scored and punctured with intricate arrangements of dots. These marks evoke constellations, or the small symbols used to denote trees when seen from above, extending the paintings’ attention to each specimen into another visual register.

‘Street Choir II’ is the artist’s second collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands. Long fascinated by the individuality and peculiar dignity of trees, Davis invites us to look again at the ordinary landscapes we move through, finding unexpected beauty and humour in the natural forms that inhabit our streets, parks and suburban fringes.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Michael Davis

16/10/2026

NOW OPEN: GEORGIA PRICONE | ‘Still Here’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

This weekend at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, we are delighted to welcome a bouquet of elegantly composed, exquisitely realised oil paintings by GEORGIA PRICONE with the opening of ‘Still Here’. Now on view and available to explore online, this body of work finds the Naarm/Melbourne-based artist returning to the still-life genre with the sensitivity and technical assurance that distinguished her gallery debut in our 2023 group show ‘Botanica Vita’.

‘Still Here’ brings together flowers, glass vessels and white drapery in a series of vignettes informed by close observation. Here, languid folds of fabric in creamy alabaster tones set the stage for vivid red waratahs and coiling cymbidium orchids that send their branching stems and asymmetrical blooms beyond the neat contours of their containers.

“Rooted in the traditions of still-life painting, ‘Still Here’ explores the delicate relationship between presence, memory and impermanence,” says Pricone, whose exacting realism is tempered by an attunement to the quiet emotional pull of light, texture and shadow. “The serene beauty of still-life paintings, where nature is depicted in its fullest glory, serves as a gentle reminder of the temporality of life.”

Pricone’s glassware introduces a counterpoint of polished curves and ornament, while the cloth behind it falls into broad, sculptural folds. In its pale gradations of light and shadow, the drapery recalls the forms and materiality of classical sculpture, even as the flowers themselves offer a more ephemeral presence.

“Rather than seeking to dramatise their subjects, the works offer moments of stillness, encouraging the viewer to linger over the textures, light and delicate details of each arrangement,” says the artist. “The exhibition is a celebration of the ordinary act of noticing; a flower gathered from the garden, light falling across a familiar vessel, or an object carrying the memory of those who came before us.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

G E O R G I A

15/10/2026

NOW OPEN: IRENE CROWE | ‘Nocturne’ | Until 8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to present ‘Nocturne’ – a sublime new suite of atmospheric landscapes by IRENE CROWE. Reflecting on memory, emotion and the places onto which we project our inner worlds, Crowe’s moody, meditative and romantic paintings see luminous skies unfold above terrain slowly abstracted by recollection, longing and the half-light of memory.

“This body of work continues my exploration of how our personal memories and cultural histories shape our experiences of landscapes,” says Crowe. “My work has always been a way for me to process emotions, often capturing the tenderness and nostalgia of a place visited on my travels or sometimes in dreams.”

Created amid a period of personal change, ‘Nocturne’ follows Crowe’s move from the Eora/Sydney home whose skies and harbour light had become embedded in her visual imagination. “This change was so rapid that I was only able to recognise it once we had already moved through it,” she says.

“These feelings intensified while I was going through ongoing challenges with fertility. Art-making became so important as I found myself thinking deeply about creation and how little control we sometimes have over the things we want most. These works do not seek to resolve that uncertainty, rather it became a place to hold the complexity.”

With ‘Nocturne’, Crowe’s immersion in the bush and littoral zones informs dreamy, gently enveloping scenes that hover between the observed and remembered – tinged with elemental drama and cohering through shifting cloudbursts of colour and light. “Each work evokes the tenderness and quiet melancholy of our connection to the places we inhabit, return to and come to know intimately,” says Crowe.

“For me, it is the depiction of skies that echo the surreal connection I have to my old home. While terrain remains abstracted, what emerges is a sense of nostalgia and transition which are subject to the memories of each viewer.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Irene Crowe

14/10/2026

“This suite of paintings comes from a time when I chose to remove myself from routine commitments to spend long stretches of time thinking, observing and hiking,” says Port Stephens-based artist and 2026 Hadley’s Art Prize finalist LINDA GREEDY of the seeds for her upcoming solo exhibition, ‘Wintering’ – opening next month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands and now available to preview by request. “Hiking and the landscape allow me to settle my mind, to recalibrate, providing me with the opportunity to explore visual and emotional inspiration – solitude, exposure, shelter and beauty.”

Painting on her travels across Tasmania, Greedy develops sprawling, densely worked scenes from the island’s exposed landscape, where the distinctive silhouettes of macrocarpa pines, long planted as windbreaks against its harsh conditions, stand sentinel across the terrain. ‘Wintering’ also introduces a new setting, equally one of remote extremes and sublime beauty: the Cape to Cape Track in the south-west of Western Australia.

“The track winds inland through dense coastal heath to intermittently emerge onto rugged, windblown granite headlands, affording spectacular views of remote beaches,” says Greedy. “Here, in WA, the native peppermint and melaleuca trees cling to the headlands, pruned and twisted sideways, holding out against the fierce Roaring Forties winds.”

Back home, Greedy draws on the scenery that surrounded her on these long expeditions, committing them to canvas. What was encountered almost incidentally on the trail is now examined, selected and resolved with a brush and oils. The meditative rhythm of walking gives way to the more demanding business of making a picture.

In addition to this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize, Greedy has previously been a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, Lethbridge 20,000 and Muswellbrook Art Prize. ‘Wintering’ is the artist’s third exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, after two warmly received showings in 2025 – each broader in scope and ambition than the last and both acquired in their entirety.

For previews, please email [email protected]

Linda Greedy

12/10/2026

COMING SOON: MICHAEL DAVIS | 14 October–8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to announce the imminent return of Eora/Sydney-based painter MICHAEL DAVIS, whose latest body of work will be presented at the gallery this week alongside ‘Nocturne’, a new solo exhibition by IRENE CROWE. Returning to the landscape as a vessel for memory, feeling and imaginative possibility, Davis brings his distinctive visual language to familiar scenes of suburban and urban nature, finding moments of quiet wonder in the trees and green spaces that punctuate our everyday surroundings.

Long fascinated by the individuality and peculiar dignity of trees, Davis has developed a practice that transforms these ubiquitous yet often overlooked features into expressive characters, at once familiar and enigmatic. Solitary trunks and loosely gathered clusters of foliage emerge against radiant fields of colour, with their forms hovering between representation and abstraction as sweeping horizontal passages suggest the open expanse of a landscape remembered rather than directly observed.

In Davis’s paintings, the humble street tree becomes a kind of protagonist – a silent witness to the passing rhythms of everyday life, imbued with memory, meaning and a distinctly human resonance. His compositions invite us to look again at the ordinary landscapes we move through, revealing unexpected beauty, humour and emotional resonance in the natural forms that inhabit our streets, parks and suburban fringes.

Presented alongside Irene Crowe’s ‘Nocturne’, Davis’s forthcoming exhibition brings another distinctive perspective to the expressive possibilities of landscape painting. Both artists explore the space between observation and imagination, finding in the familiar world a rich terrain for memory, feeling and personal reflection.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Michael Davis

12/10/2026

COMING SOON: LILY PLATTS | ‘Where We Sit’ | 14 October–8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Naarm/Melbourne-based artist LILY PLATTS returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands this week with ‘Where We Sit’ – a vibrant new collection of paintings and ceramic sculptures that finds fresh possibilities in a recurring subject: the chair. From roadside cast-offs and op-shop finds to seating gleaned from garage sales and online marketplaces, Platts draws on the incidental arrangements of everyday objects, transforming overlooked scenes and happy accidents into playful studies of colour, form and traces of human presence.

“I gravitate to discarded objects I encounter in transitional environments,” says Platts, a former Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship recipient and 2023 National Emerging Art Prize finalist. “Within these overlooked items lies a profound beauty and humanity that captivates me. I’m drawn to the unexpected compositions that emerge when these objects are displayed with little consideration or regard.”

Long fascinated by the ways ordinary objects evoke the people who have used them and the places and experiences they have been part of, Platts returns to her signature motif with renewed material experimentation. Alongside a return to oil painting, ‘Where We Sit’ sees the artist continue to extend her practice into ceramics, exploring the sculptural possibilities of familiar domestic objects.

“We’re inundated with a constant influx of new products, fostering a mindset that views objects as easily replaceable commodities,” says Platts, who made her Southern Highlands debut in 2022. “I aim to challenge this notion and prompt a reevaluation of the value of the items that surround us, even in their unwanted state.”

Bringing warmth and compositional whimsy to the familiar and discarded, ‘Where We Sit’ invites us to consider what the objects we live with – and those we leave behind – might reveal about our shared experiences, personal histories and the value we assign to everyday things.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Lily Platts

09/10/2026

COMING SOON: IRENE CROWE | ‘Nocturne’ | 14 October–8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to announce ‘Nocturne’, a new series by Eora/Sydney artist IRENE CROWE that will debut this month in a paired presentation with her fellow painter MICHAEL DAVIS. Reflecting on memory, emotion and the landscapes onto which we project our inner worlds, Crowe’s moody and meditative paintings find luminous skies unfolding above abstracted terrain, with familiar places transformed by recollection, longing and the half-light of memory.

“This body of work continues my exploration of how our personal memories and cultural histories shape our experiences of landscapes,” says Crowe, whose paintings are less concerned with recording a particular place than distilling the emotional resonance it leaves behind. “My work has always been a way for me to process emotions, often capturing the tenderness and nostalgia of a place visited either on my travels or sometimes in dreams.”

Created against a backdrop of significant personal change, ‘Nocturne’ follows Crowe’s move from the Sydney home whose skies and harbour light had become embedded in her visual imagination. “This period of change was so rapid that I was only able to recognise it once we had already moved through it,” she says. “These feelings intensified while I was going through ongoing challenges with fertility. Art-making became so important as I found myself thinking deeply about creation and how little control we sometimes have over the things we want most. These works do not seek to resolve that uncertainty, rather it became a place to hold the complexity.”

With ‘Nocturne’, Crowe’s immersion in the Australian bush and beside large bodies of water feeds into landscapes that hover between the observed and remembered, inviting viewers to recognise the feeling of a place while allowing their own memories to complete it. “What emerges is a sense of nostalgia and transition, which are subject to the memories of each viewer,” says Crowe.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Irene Crowe

08/10/2026

“Many First Nations understandings of Country do not position humans outside nature, but within interconnected systems of land, water, sky and movement,” says Dharawal-based Anaiwan artist MIRANDA HAMPSON, whose first full-scale solo exhibition with our galleries, ‘Esoteric Lore’, opens this month across our Southern Highlands and Northern Beaches spaces and can now be previewed by request. “The transition isn’t a sudden rupture, rather it’s adaptive, cellular and tidal. The structure appears stable, but begins to loosen, disperse and reorganise. Not collapse as ending, but collapse as transformation.”

A National Emerging Art Prize finalist in 2024, Hampson made her Berrima debut with a sold-out series for our 2025 group show ‘Lookaftering’ before returning with ‘Vantage’, a paired presentation with PETA WEST that was also acquired in its entirety. After a year of award nods – including the Hadley’s Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the Mosman Art Prize, where she won the Installers’ Choice Award – Hampson returns with her most ambitious body of work to date.

Hampson’s practice entwines remarkable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in material, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, fine painted marks accumulate into intricate woven forms, filaments and rippling fields, giving surfaces a quality at once organic, densely layered and impossibly weightless.

The fishing net provides a central image – sometimes recognisable as an object suspended against a neutral ground, elsewhere spreading across the canvas and approaching abstraction. Other works explore the ocean and the organisms sustaining its ecosystems. In one, strands of kelp bend and dance with tidal currents, extending Hampson’s exploration of reciprocity and interdependence. “The organisms that sustain the world are often the least visible,” she says. “Like phytoplankton and kelp, they remind us that life persists through countless acts of exchange and connection beyond our immediate view.”

For previews, please email [email protected]

Firman Miranda

06/10/2026

COMING SOON: GEORGIA PRICONE | ‘Still Here’ | 14 October–8 November | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to announce our next solo exhibition by GEORGIA PRICONE, whose exquisite new series, ‘Still Here’ – now available to preview by request – finds her returning to the still-life genre with the technical assurance and close observation that coloured her gallery debut in our 2023 group show ‘Botanica Vita’.

The seven paintings in ‘Still Here’ are the result of sustained periods of looking in her Naarm/Melbourne studio, where Pricone works with an almost scholarly concentration on the particularities of her subjects. Their apparent simplicity is hard-won. Flowers and glass vessels are arranged and subtly repositioned until each element assumes its place. Against expanses of softly billowing white drapery, the density of a petal, the transparency of glass, the weight of fabric and the peculiar translucency of a leaf become events in themselves.

“Rooted in the traditions of still-life painting, ‘Still Here’ explores the delicate relationship between presence, memory and impermanence,” says Pricone, whose waratahs and orchids retain the asymmetry and irregularity of the living plant, with stems tracing unexpected diagonals and leaves projecting beyond the measured confines of delicate glass vessels. “The serene beauty of still-life paintings, where nature is depicted in its fullest glory, serves as a gentle reminder of the temporality of life.”

Pricone’s exacting realism is tempered by an intentional quietness, inviting the eye to linger over shifts in texture, light and shadow. “Rather than seeking to dramatise their subjects, the works offer moments of stillness and close observation,” she says. “Ultimately, the exhibition is a celebration of the ordinary act of noticing; a flower gathered from the garden, light falling across a familiar vessel or an object carrying the memory of those who came before us.”

All works from ‘Still Here’ can now be previewed by request ahead of the opening. Please email [email protected]

G E O R G I A

Michael Reid Southern Highlands

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