Painting Now 2025

Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney

4 - 28 December 2025

*Wayfinding*, 2025, oil on canvas, 122 x 97 cm

*Boundary Lines*, 2025, oil on canvas, 183.5 x 122 cm

*Dandelions*, 2025, oil on canvas, 93 x 71.5 cm

*Magnetic Variation*, 2025, oil on canvas, 92 x 71.5 cm

The bending of light, 2025, 101.5 x 97cm

Painting Now 2025

Michael Reid Sydney’s 2025 exhibition program culminates this month with the latest edition of Painting Now. Curated by Dean Phillips-Andersen, our annual group survey spotlights an exciting school of established contemporary painters from across Australia whose practices expand the creative possibilities of art’s most storied medium.

Painting Now 2025 presents significant new bodies of work by Columbiere Tipungwuti, Jo Chew, Heath Nock, Dhukumul Waṉambi and Brenton Drechsler. With their distinct approaches, perspectives and preoccupations, these artists recast painting as an expanded creative field, pushing the medium into optically charged, technically dazzling and conceptually daring terrain.

The success of so many Painting Now alumni reflects the program’s ambition to identify, mentor and celebrate singular talents at a moment of creative breakthrough, presenting their work just as it ascends to a new level of collectability and acclaim.