Michael Reid Sydney, 109 Shepherd Street, Sydney (2026)

16/10/2026

“The interventions alter how space is perceived,” says acclaimed Australian photographer and filmmaker MURRAY FREDERICKS, whose first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney is on view this weekend. “In ‘Blaze’, fire reorganises the field. The sites were chosen specifically because they were ephemeral landscapes – temporary bodies of water that exist only under particular conditions. The flame operates in the same way: both are transient states that briefly permit a landscape to exist before vanishing.”

Fredericks’s Michael Reid Sydney exhibition coincides with his major touring exhibition ‘The salt lake’ – curated by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) and currently on view at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour – as well as his inclusion in this year’s Bowness Photography Prize exhibition at MAPh.

“The mirror works operate through geometry and light,” says Fredericks of his ‘Vanity’ series, represented in his Michael Reid Sydney exhibition alongside works from ‘Blaze’, his landmark ‘Salt’ project and ‘Dog Fence, Solitary Posts’ – the work that earned him his third selection as a finalist in the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize.

“By inserting reflective planes into the landscape, I introduced a surface that absorbs and redirects the existing field. In the final image, the mirror ceases to read as an object and instead functions as a plane of abstraction. Horizon, sky and ground fold into one another, expanding the way the landscape can be read.”

Taken together, the works comprising Fredericks’s first Michael Reid Sydney show connect the enduring aesthetic and conceptual preoccupations of a singular art practice shaped by prolonged solitary immersion in remote environments and elemental extremes. Grounded in reduction, seriality and sustained attention, his work distils light, horizon and material intervention into arresting, luminescent images that move beyond the landscape as scenery and into the realm of minimalist, optically charged abstraction.

For more, please email [email protected]

Murray Fredericks

15/10/2026

A centrepiece of the State Library of New South Wales’s 200th anniversary celebrations, ‘Definitive Dupain’ is now on view in the library’s Mitchell Wing, drawing from an extraordinary cache of more than 250,000 Max Dupain negatives and prints to chart a sweeping path through the pioneering photographer’s varied career. This landmark exhibition traverses the legendary lensman’s experimental portraiture, fashion and architectural photography, social documentary, personal work and more, offering the most comprehensive portrait to date of the great Australian imagemaker and his enduring legacy.

To mark the occasion, Michael Reid Sydney will soon present ‘A Nation on the Sand’ – an expansive survey featuring many of the most iconic photographs from Dupain’s six-decade career. Available to preview ahead of the opening on 12 November, our complementary show distils the legacy so richly illuminated by ‘Definitive Dupain’ into a focused collection of his most celebrated, astonishing and emblematic images, offering a rare opportunity to acquire works also represented within the library’s archive.

“Working ceaselessly from the late 1920s until his death in 1992, Dupain established himself as one of the most prolific and skilled photographers of the 20th century,” notes ‘Definitive Dupain’ curator Avryl Whitnall. “His lens captured Australia’s people, first and foremost, but also its flora and fauna, its architecture, its urban and rural landscapes, and even its manufactured products. His collected body of work is as much a singular artistic achievement as it is a striking visual memory of Australian culture.”

Central to ‘A Nation on the Sand’ are the beach photographs through which Dupain helped forge an indelible image of modern Australia. These defining pictures capture Australians at leisure, embracing the sun and sea as a new national identity took shape around the freedoms and vitality of outdoor life. For the first time in more than three decades, these photographs – including ‘Sunbaker’ – are reunited in a single exhibition and available for acquisition.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

11/10/2026

To mark the occasion of the National Gallery of Victoria’s groundbreaking MARGARET PRESTON retrospective – now on view at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and continuing until 31 January – an extraordinary cache of eight original woodcuts by the legendary artist, pioneering modernist and pivotal figure in the story of Australian art is now being offered together for acquisition as a single, indivisible collection by Michael Reid Sydney, where it can be viewed in person by request.

“The art of Margaret Preston (1875–1963) has shaped the cultural and aesthetic landscape of Australia,” note the NGV curators in the introduction to the landmark survey’s accompanying hardback tome. “Participating in the growing discourses surrounding modernism, Preston began to merge a variety of influences, such as Post-Impressionism, primitivism in European art, the Arts and Crafts movement, and Japanese ukiyo-e. Following Preston’s return from Europe to Sydney in 1919, she established herself as a central figure in the dissemination of modernist principles and pursued the development of a visual language that was uniquely Australian.”

Spanning 1925 to 1939, ‘A Collection of Important Prints’ traces the artist’s evolution as a printmaker, from the jewel-like floral compositions of her celebrated 1925 exhibition to the increasingly abstracted still lifes and rare late impressions produced during her years in Berowra. Among the highlights are ‘Mosman Bridge’, 1927, and ‘Gum Blossoms’, 1928, both represented in the NGV retrospective, with impressions also held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and other major state institutions. These eight works provide a rare opportunity to acquire a concentrated survey of Preston’s groundbreaking printmaking practice at a moment of renewed institutional attention to her remarkable legacy.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

08/10/2026

NOW OPEN: DREW TRUSLOVE | ‘Waterline’ | Until 29 October | Michael Reid Northern Beaches

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present ‘Waterline’ – the latest solo exhibition by newly represented Eora/Sydney-based artist and 2024 National Emerging Art Prize Award of Excellence winner DREW TRUSLOVE. Arriving soon after the announcement of the artist’s joint representation by our Northern Beaches and Southern Highlands galleries, Truslove’s exhibition is one of two shows inaugurating our new space in Brookvale and will be toasted at the gallery’s opening party this Friday, 9 October, 4pm.

“This series looks at the human experience of beaches, with people playing in the shallows, strolling in the sand and walking towards the beach,” says Truslove. “To be clear, however, these are really landscape pictures and the humans are quite secondary. I like portraying people in landscapes in a fairly rudimentary and brief way, having them dwarfed by nature. They’re very much cameos against the backdrop of the main star of the show.”

Throughout ‘Waterline’, rocky oceanfront escarpments capped with Norfolk pines and covered in lacy thickets of bush soar above stretches of sand and crashing waves – all captured with Truslove’s trademark indigo blue ink and meandering linework that loops, pools, doubles back and dissipates into expanses of crisp white canvas. Often approaching a single site from multiple viewpoints, Truslove translates the forms and textures of the landscape into line, density, rhythm and space, exploring how a single colour can accommodate the extraordinary complexity of the natural world.

“This is a stunning beach that we’ve only recently heard about,” says Truslove of his show’s sprawling centrepiece, ‘Boneyard beach, second angle’. “The beauty of the place was quite striking. People tend to lose themselves in the environment, fossicking among the rocks and the shells.”

All works from ‘Waterline’ can be explored and acquired online, by request and at our new Brookvale home – officially opening Friday, 9 October, at 4pm. For more, please email [email protected]

Drew Truslove

08/10/2026

NOW OPEN: MURRAY FREDERICKS | Until 7 November | Michael Reid Sydney

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present our first solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian photographer and filmmaker MURRAY FREDERICKS since the announcement of his representation by our galleries.

Spanning key projects from across his globally celebrated career, the exhibition coincides with the artist’s large-scale survey ‘The salt lake’ – curated by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) and currently on tour at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour – as well as his presence in this year’s Bowness Photography Prize exhibition at MAPh.

Over almost three decades, Fredericks has refined a singular photographic language shaped by prolonged solitary immersion in remote environments at the far edges of elemental extremes. Through a durational practice grounded in reduction and seriality, Fredericks distils light, horizon and interventions on the land into arresting, luminescent images that move beyond the landscape as scenery and into the realm of minimalist, optically charged abstraction.

The artist’s showing in this year’s Bowness marks his third time as a finalist in the country’s most significant photography award, and his shortlisted work, ‘Dog Fence, Solitary Posts’, now features in his first Michael Reid Sydney show.

Throughout his career, Fredericks has approached remote, often forbidding environments – including his longtime muse, Lake Eyre – not as sites of spectacle or endurance, but as conditions for an investigation of light, space and temporality. “Working on salt lakes allowed the landscape to be reduced to an almost blank field and the work moved away from topography towards perception itself,” says Fredericks, whose exhibition encompasses works from his seminal, decades-long ‘Salt’ project and the more recent ‘Blaze’ and ‘Vanity’.

“Light, tonality and scale became the primary elements. Landscape was no longer a subject to depict, but a space through which to explore duration, emptiness and the psychological states that emerge through immersion.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Murray Fredericks

07/10/2026

COMING SOON: MAX DUPAIN | ‘A Nation on the Sand’ | Michael Reid Sydney

Michael Reid Sydney is thrilled to announce ‘A Nation on the Sand’ – an expansive survey featuring some of the most significant and iconic images from the six-decade career of Australia’s most famous photographer, MAX DUPAIN. Available to preview by request, our exhibition coincides with ‘Definitive Dupain’, the landmark retrospective now on view at the State Library of NSW as part of its 200th-anniversary celebrations.

Curated by Avryl Whitnall and drawn from the Library’s extraordinary archive of more than 250,000 Dupain negatives and prints, ‘Definitive Dupain’ traverses the breadth of a career spanning experimental modernism, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising, social documentary, architectural photography and intimate personal work. Our complementary survey distils this legacy into a tightly focused collection of Dupain’s most celebrated, astonishing and emblematic images, offering collectors a rare opportunity to experience and acquire works also represented within the Library’s vaunted Dupain archive and its historic retrospective.

Central to ‘A Nation on the Sand’ are the beach photographs through which Dupain helped forge an enduring image of modern Australia. ‘Sunbaker’ (1937), ‘Bondi’ (1939), ‘At Newport’ (1952) and other defining images capture Australians at leisure, embracing the sun, sand and sea as a new national identity took shape around the freedoms and physical vitality of outdoor life. In ‘Sunbaker’ – the most famous photograph ever made in Australia – body and landscape are reduced to elemental form, transforming a moment on Culburra Beach into an image now embedded in the country’s cultural consciousness.

For the first time in more than three decades, Dupain’s iconic beach photographs are reunited in a single exhibition and available for acquisition. ‘A Nation on the Sand’ traces the formal experimentation and extraordinary range of a photographer whose images did not merely document Australian life but helped shape how the nation came to see itself.

For previews, please email [email protected]

06/10/2026

THIS WEEK: MURRAY FREDERICKS | 8 October–7 November | Michael Reid Sydney

This week, Michael Reid Sydney will present our first full-scale solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian photographer and filmmaker MURRAY FREDERICKS since he joined the gallery earlier this year. Now available to preview by request, the exhibition coincides with his career-spanning survey ‘The salt lake’ – curated by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) and currently on tour at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour – and his presence in this year’s Bowness Photography Prize at MAPh, where his shortlisted work, ‘Dog Fence, Solitary Posts’, is now on view.

Across a globally celebrated career of close to three decades, Fredericks has refined a singular photographic language shaped by prolonged solitary immersion in remote environments at the far edges of elemental extremes. Grounded in reduction, seriality and sustained attention, his work distils light, horizon and interventions on the land into arresting, luminescent images that move beyond the landscape as scenery and into the realm of reductionist, optically charged abstraction. This year marks Fredericks’s third time as a Bowness Prize finalist, and his shortlisted work will feature in his upcoming show.

From the Greenland ice sheet to his longtime muse, Lake Eyre, where he has returned more than 30 times, Fredericks approaches remote, often forbidding environments not as sites of spectacle or endurance, but as conditions for sustained engagement with light, space and temporality.

“Working on salt lakes allowed the landscape to be reduced to an almost blank field and the work moved away from topography towards perception itself,” says Fredericks, whose exhibition will encompass his seminal, decades-long ‘Salt’ project alongside works from his more recent ‘Blaze’ and ‘Vanity’ series. “Light, tonality and scale became the primary elements. The landscape was no longer a subject to depict, but a space through which to explore duration, emptiness and the psychological states that emerge through immersion.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Murray Fredericks

29/09/2026

NOW OPEN: MAI NGUYỄN-LONG | ‘Vomit Girl: Shifting’ | Until 13 December | Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art

MAI NGUYỄN-LONG is now presenting her expansive sculptural installation ‘Vomit Girl: Shifting’ at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon as part of the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Catherine Nichols. The Dharawal/Bulli-based artist completed the collection of clay sculptures during three months as Artist in Residence at Moly-Sabata in Sablons, with the support of the Australian Government through Creative Australia and the Australian Embassy in France.

“Nguyễn-Long responds to imposed silence, rejection and displacement,” writes Nichols, connecting the artist’s ‘Vomit Girl’ sculptures to the broader themes of the biennale – titled ‘To pass from one dream to another’ and now unfolding across the city, with Lyon’s famous traboules forming its conceptual entry point.

“Shaped through processes of fragmentation and reassembly, her work – oscillating between humour and unease – draws on hybrid cultural references to address experiences of silencing and re-emergence. Each sculpture thus becomes, in the artist’s words, a ‘contemporary folkloric form’ through which stories obscured by diasporic trauma regain voice and form, unfolding into alternative modes of memory and transmission.”

Nguyễn-Long’s invitation to create an ambitious new body of work for the 18th Lyon Biennale affirms her position as one of the most original and compelling voices in Australian art today and builds on an impressive run of accolades, commissions and international projects, having previously shown at the Berlin Biennale and more recently at Talbot Rice Gallery after her residency with the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.

“I’ve come to think of the Vomit Girl project as opening up a space in between absolutes and that’s a place of belonging,” says Nguyễn-Long. “She’s not just one thing, she’s many things, and that elusiveness reflects aspects of my own self.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Mai Nguyen-Long
Biennale de Lyon — Art
Moly-Sabata

Photography: .soulage

27/09/2026

COMING SOON: MURRAY FREDERICKS | 8 October–7 November | Michael Reid Sydney

“The mirror works operate through geometry and light,” says award-winning photographer and filmmaker MURRAY FREDERICKS, whose first solo exhibition since joining Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin opens at our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery in two weeks and can now be previewed by request.

“By inserting reflective planes into the landscape, I introduced a surface that absorbs and redirects the existing field. In the final image, the mirror ceases to read as an object and instead functions as a plane of abstraction. Horizon, sky and ground fold into one another, expanding the way the landscape can be read.”

Fredericks’s forthcoming show arrives at a significant moment in his acclaimed three-decade career. His survey, ‘The salt lake’, has just opened at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour, bringing together still and moving images from his ‘Salt’, ‘Array’, ‘Vanity’ and ‘Blaze’ projects, while his work ‘Dog Fence, Solitary Posts’ is on view in the Bowness Photography Prize exhibition at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), marking his third appearance in Australia’s most significant photography prize.

Fredericks’s first Michael Reid Sydney exhibition brings photographs from his seminal, decades-spanning ‘Salt’ project into conversation with more recent images, tracing the visual and conceptual threads of a globally celebrated practice shaped by prolonged immersion in environments at the far edges of elemental extremes.

The artist’s Bowness work forms a key part of the exhibition. “The Dog Fence is the longest continuous humanmade structure in the world,” says Fredericks, who traced approximately 1,500 kilometres of the fence through a simple methodology: a photograph made every 300 metres. “Conceived as a survey of place, the work instead became an investigation of the fence’s structures and their interaction with the landscape. Palimpsestic images collapse multiple locations into shared forms, revealing a landscape shaped by repetition, intervention and control.”

For previews, please email [email protected]

Murray Fredericks

24/09/2026

NOW OPEN: TAMARA DEAN & MURRAY FREDERICKS | Bowness Photography Prize | Until 8 November | Museum of Australian Photography

The 2026 Bowness Photography Prize exhibition is now on view at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) in Naarm/Melbourne, where TAMARA DEAN’s award-winning photograph ‘Metamorphosis’ is showing alongside works by all 50 of this year’s finalists – including her Michael Reid stablemate MURRAY FREDERICKS.

Recently previewed by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin at Sydney Contemporary, ‘Metamorphosis’ forms part of Dean’s forthcoming series ‘The Garden’ and will now enter MAPh’s permanent collection following its selection for Australian contemporary photography’s most significant honour. “Metamorphosis reflects my fascination with transformation in nature and our place as humans within cycles of growth, decay and renewal,” says Dean, who created the work alone in her purpose-built underwater studio. “Using my own body as the subject, I imagined myself unfurling like a flower opening towards light, emerging from a luminous yellow form.”

Dean is joined in the exhibition by acclaimed Australian photographer and filmmaker MURRAY FREDERICKS, whose ‘Dog Fence, Solitary Posts’ marks his third selection as a Bowness Prize finalist. Drawn from his latest project, ‘Dog Fence’ (2018–2026), the work forms part of a vast photographic survey tracing approximately 1,500 kilometres of the world’s longest continuous humanmade structure, with Fredericks making an image every 300 metres.

“Conceived as a survey of place, the work instead became an investigation of the fence’s structures and their interaction with the landscape,” says the artist, whose Bowness work will also feature in his first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney, which opens in two weeks and can now be previewed by request.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Tamara Dean
Murray Fredericks
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)

Michael Reid Sydney

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