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

04/09/2026

NOW OPEN: STEPHANIE TABRAM | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

Tasmanian artist STEPHANIE TABRAM is exhibiting her latest work at Sydney Contemporary this week, marking her first showing with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin since the announcement of her representation by our galleries earlier this year.

Across a career spanning more than three decades, the award-winning artist has honed a singular approach to landscape painting that reconciles the traditions of realism with a deeply felt, experiential understanding of place. “Before work each day, I spend an hour or two walking along the riverbank,” says Tabram, who lives and works in New Norfolk on the Derwent River. “It has become a daily meditation: observing the minutiae, the subtle changes, the passing seasons, and the life and flow of the river itself.”

At once expansive and intricately detailed, Tabram’s compositions unfold as complex visual fields in which light, atmosphere and texture are held in dynamic equilibrium. Sunlit foliage, silvery waterways and the brooding, gothic drama of Tasmanian skies are rendered through a meticulous process of layering in acrylic, built gradually with ultrafine strokes into images that feel less like static views than living, cumulative records of place.

Tabram deftly distils the simultaneity at play within the landscape – the way the day’s last light might momentarily set native grasses gilt-edged and aglow, even as roiling clouds gather above distant blue-grey ridgelines; the faceted interplay of steep escarpments and pastoral fields, carved with shadows and compressed into an arresting pictorial plane; the glittering blaze of autumn foliage or weeping, wintry trees doubled and transformed in the river’s cool reflections.

The result is an epic tapestry of place, in which multiple temporal and atmospheric experiences are suspended on canvas and slowly coalesce into one absorbing vision. See Tabram’s new works at Carriageworks until this Sunday, 6 September.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Stephanie Tabram

Portraits by Rosie Hastie | Rosie Hastie

03/09/2026

Sydney Contemporary’s 10th-anniversary edition is already off to a flying start. Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is thrilled to be back with our most expansive and ambitious art fair presentation to date – now on view at Carriageworks and available to explore online.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for last night’s VIP Preview. The booth was buoyant and buzzing as artists, collectors, art lovers and colleagues all converged – and it’s only the beginning! We look forward to welcoming everyone to Booth C11 for this evening’s official Opening Night.

Bringing together extraordinary new work by more than 20 leading contemporary artists across painting, photography, sculpture and installation, our Sydney Contemporary exhibition offers a sweeping survey of Australian art now – a dynamic celebration of the country’s most original creative voices and the here-and-now of their practice.

Julz Beresford | Betty Chimney | Tamara Dean | Troy Emery | Murray Fredericks | Petrina Hicks | John Honeywill | Linde Ivimey | Leila Jeffreys | Carly Le Cerf | Kathy Liu | Tim Maguire | Mai Nguyễn-Long | Sid Pattni | Scott Perkins | Stephanie Tabram | Gaypalani Waṉambi | Regina Pilawuk Wilson | Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra Yukuwa

All works can be explored and acquired online and at Carriageworks, where the fair’s packed program of exhibitions, conversations, parties and performances continues until this Sunday, 6 September.

We look forward to seeing you at the fair! For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Photographs by Fiona Susanto | Fiona Susanto

Sydney Contemporary

03/09/2026

02/09/2026

THIS WEEK: TAMARA DEAN | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

Acclaimed Australian artist TAMARA DEAN offers visitors to the 10th anniversary edition of Sydney Contemporary an exclusive first look at her new work ‘Metamorphosis’ – recently shortlisted for the 2026 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in what is now the fourth major awards nod for a photograph from the same project: her forthcoming series, ‘The Garden’.

Suspended underwater against a velvety abyss, Dean’s own gracefully contorted figure is enveloped by extraordinary yellow-gold fabric, its billowing folds transforming the body and its wake into a molten, almost abstract spectre somewhere between human and flower. The image emerged from an especially challenging shoot, with Dean moving constantly between the camera and her underwater studio as both photographer and subject.

“I wanted to blur the line between human and flower, inviting a moment of recognition that we belong to the same living world,” says Dean. “By leaning into the qualities we share with the natural world – our vulnerability, resilience and capacity for transformation – I wanted to capture a moment which expressed the beauty, fragility and grace of a flower unfurling and turning towards the light.”

Having recently turned 50, Dean has been thinking about ageing “as another stage of becoming”, with ‘Metamorphosis’ folding this awareness into the ecological concerns that have animated her work for two decades. “At the heart of this series, and really all of my work, is conservation,” she says. “We are part of nature, not separate from it.”

Accompanied at Sydney Contemporary by Dean’s sweeping ‘Dandenong Ranges’, ‘Metamorphosis’ stands as a major achievement from one of her generation’s defining image-makers as well as a beguiling glimpse of what is to come when ‘The Garden’ is in full bloom at Michael Reid Sydney in February 2027.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Tamara Dean

Portrait by Fiona Susanto for Belle magazine

02/09/2026

NOW OPEN: JOHN HONEYWILL | ‘Lean Towards’ | Until 26 September | Michael Reid Sydney

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present ‘Lean Towards’ – the latest solo exhibition by celebrated Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist JOHN HONEYWILL and his first at our Eora/Sydney gallery in more than two years. True to its title, ‘Lean Towards’ is an elegant paean to the painter’s curious affinities – the objects to which he is slowly, almost inexplicably drawn and compelled to capture on canvas.

With meticulous precision and masterly control of light and mood, Honeywill casts otherwise unassuming objects as quietly dazzling painterly protagonists seemingly lit from within. From brown paper packages tied up with string to sugary sweets and delicate vessels heaped with fruit or unfolding flowers, these unsentimental yet emotionally resonant subjects exude a stillness and subtle alchemy as they coalesce in graceful and disarming conversations. “I paint the quiet visual conversations between everyday objects,” says Honeywill, also presenting select works from ‘Lean Towards’ at Sydney Contemporary.

Suspended against ambiguous, luminescent planes and rendered with astonishing detail, Honeywill’s subjects appear at once intensely present and curiously untethered from the everyday. “What I’m interested in is the act of looking, perceiving an object and trying to capture more,” he says, “its presence, and also the relationship to the space around it.” The resulting works speak to the animating interplay of an object’s presence and the artist’s perception – hence the title of his 2023 monograph, ‘Presence and Perception’.

More than 50 years since staging his first solo show in a kiosk at Bargara Beach, Honeywill remains one of Australia’s most accomplished contemporary exponents of the still-life genre. His work is held in public collections, including QAGOMA and the Museum of Brisbane. ‘Lean Towards’ finds an artist of extraordinary technical assurance continuing to follow the instincts and fascinations that have propelled his practice from the beginning.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

John Honeywill

02/09/2026

THIS WEEK: TROY EMERY | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

A magnificent pride of feline sculptures by acclaimed Naarm/Melbourne-based artist TROY EMERY will prowl through Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s largest Sydney Contemporary presentation to date, set to open tomorrow – Thursday, 3 September – following this afternoon’s VIP Preview. This new series finds Emery folding plush feathered plumes into the tactile, soft-sculptural vocabulary for which he is widely celebrated.

Remixing references to art and natural history, decorative crafts and museological conventions of spectacle and display, Emery fashions otherworldly animal forms as playful representations of the unknowable other. These strange emissaries from the non-human world invite us to reflect on our position both within and apart from nature – and the all-too-human desires, anxieties and systems we continually project onto it.

Meticulously fashioned by hand with a couturier’s precision and imaginative flourish, Emery’s fair-bound menagerie of impossible creatures exudes a captivating mystique with more than a soupçon of camp – haughty and inscrutable beneath their lurid pelts as they slink, sashay and strike curious poses across their plinths and podiums.

Working with silky neon threads, scintillating glass beadwork and now extravagant plumage, Emery embraces softness, ornament and flamboyance through a material palette that has long set his work in subversive opposition to the hard, heroic, masculinist conventions and monumental pretensions of art-historical sculpture.

Thisdynamic exchange between sculpture and textiles was further affirmed by his triumph in the 2025 Tapestry Design Prize – an accolade that came soon after the unveiling of his most significant public commission to date, the monumental ‘Guardian Lion’ at Melbourne’s Southbank.

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Troy Emery

01/09/2026

THIS WEEK: PETRINA HICKS | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

Internationally acclaimed Australian artist PETRINA HICKS will debut two new works at Sydney Contemporary 2026, extending her distinctive and enigmatic visual language through mythology, symbolism, beauty and unease with the sublime, seductive and deliciously unsettling photographic duet ‘The Fates’.

Drawing on the ancient Greek myth of the Moirai – three sisters who spin, measure and cut the thread of human life – Hicks pictures a woman doubled in mirror image while turned away from the viewer, concealed beneath a veil of pale hair as the exquisite geometry of a spiderweb stretches across the image. Its delicate concentric form might evoke a target on the figure’s back, introducing a subtle tension between vulnerability and strength.

“I’m fascinated by the extraordinary beauty and ingenuity of spiderwebs,” says Hicks. “A web is both incredibly fragile and remarkably sophisticated: an intricate architecture constructed instinctively from a single thread.”

‘The Fates’ furthers Hicks’s exploration of the female figure through concealment, doubling and symbolic transformation. “In earlier photographs, hair, animals, plants and other natural forms obscure or merge with the body, unsettling the boundary between subject and object, human and animal,” says the artist. “In ‘The Fates’, it’s the absence of the spider from the frame that creates a sense of unease.”

Here, the spider becomes a kind of weaver of destiny while patiently constructing and repairing its world. “This act of spinning connects naturally to the mythology of the Fates, whose threads determine the course and duration of human lives,” says Hicks, whose recent career has encompassed major surveys at The NGV and Museum of Australian Photography. “The web suggests that fate might similarly be understood not as a single path, but as an interconnected structure of countless threads, encounters and possibilities.”

For enquiries, please email [email protected]

Petrina Hicks

01/09/2026

THIS WEEK: CARLY LE CERF | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

A monumental four-quadrant landscape by acclaimed West Australian artist CARLY LE CERF will debut at the 10th edition of Sydney Contemporary, offering a suitably epic point of focus for Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s most ambitious art fair presentation to date.

‘Floating Above The Blues’ sees Le Cerf return to terrain encountered during her 2024 BigCi residency on the edge of Wollemi National Park. Distinct from the sunburnt, red-desert country that has more recently loomed large in her work, the Blue Mountains landscape is recalled through memories, field studies and observations gathered while walking, sketching and painting across its soaring escarpments and densely forested valleys.

“This painting has flowed in a way that feels rare,” says Le Cerf. “Months spent in the Blue Mountains seem to have found their way back into my hands and all the planning with charcoal before the first brushstroke has made the process feel effortless. Every now and then a painting reminds you just how much you’ve grown.”

Among the leading figures in Australian landscape painting, Le Cerf has forged a distinctive practice through sustained immersion in environments of personal significance. Her paintings harness the physicality of encaustic wax – layered, carved, scraped and excavated – to move between the vast, heroic sweep of the landscape and its granular, gritty detail. As the artist describes it, the process becomes a form of “sculpting the landscape”.

In her new work, densely layered greens, stark ridgelines and Wollemi’s distinctive atmospheric haze coalesce across four panels, translating the immensity of the landscape through an approach grounded as much in memory and felt experience as direct observation.

As Sarah Hetherington writes, Le Cerf’s practice lives in pursuit of awe – “that powerful and universal emotion” felt in the presence of something grand, sublime and overwhelming.

For enquiries, please email [email protected].

Portraits Jean-Michel Maujean | Jean-Michel Maujean

CARLY LE CERF
Sydney Contemporary

01/09/2026

THIS WEEK: KATHY LIU | Sydney Contemporary 2026 | 3–6 September | Carriageworks

A major survey of new work by artists at the forefront of Australian painting will form a central thread within Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin’s 10th anniversary Sydney Contemporary presentation, with our largest contingent of contemporary painters to date reaffirming the medium’s enduring vitality, conceptual breadth and material possibilities. Front and centre is Eora/Sydney artist KATHY LIU, who returns to the fair following a banner 18 months with a new suite of four dreamy and atmospheric works – now available to preview by request.

An ascendant force in Australian abstraction, Liu has garnered acclaim for a highly intuitive painterly approach in which amorphous, diaphanous layers of colour and finely worked surfaces slowly give way to enigmatic, inchoate figures and impossible architectures. With the feeling of a faded fresco or timeworn tapestry and awash with an almost celestial luminosity, her paintings unfold as imaginative worlds discovered as much as devised.

Liu’s return to the fair follows a breakout period that has included her most ambitious project to date – the large-scale solo exhibition ‘Odyssey’ at Michael Reid Sydney – and shortlistings in the 2025 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and this year’s Waverley Art Prize. Her Sydney Contemporary series brings the singular vision confidently into focus, even as her methods remain open to the unexpected possibilities of a process she has likened to “a game of chance”.

“Colours are always my cues; the play of different tones together recalls certain emotions,” says Liu. “I think of combining colours as akin to the tuning of an instrument. I am careful to keep them neither too sharp nor flat. I pay a lot of attention to the surface. I’ve always been attracted to ancient frescoes, Roman wall paintings and medieval tapestries, their surfaces concealing time, history and magic.”

For previews and priority access, please email [email protected].

Kathy Liu
Sydney Contemporary

Michael Reid Sydney

04/09/2026

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