OLSEN Gallery at Sydney Contemporary

From Gija Country in the Kimberley to inner city bars over east, and from the comfort of home to the secret life of birds, OLSEN Gallery brings together five artists whose works and styles differ greatly, but who are united by a shared interest in representation.

At Sydney Contemporary 2024, OLSEN Gallery will present new work from Leila Jeffreys, Shirley Purdie, Holly Greenwood, Eliza Gosse, and Dani McKenzie—five women whose work reflects variously on nature, on Country, or on scenes from contemporary life.

For years, Leila Jeffreys has captured with great sensitivity the personalities of Antipodean birds. In her 2022 OLSEN Gallery exhibition, among her distinctive bird portraits, Jeffreys included an image of a spotted bowerbird egg with lines like paint spatters across its surface. At Sydney Contemporary, Jeffreys will present a new series of egg photographs, including the similarly sinuous camouflage upon the egg of the banded split. This foray into oology—the study of bird eggs and nesting behaviours—is a natural companion to Jeffreys’ broader interest in the conservation of birdlife. Each image is a reminder of nature’s delicate beauty—as refined as a ceramic sculpture, and as fragile.

From Warmun Art Centre in the Kimberley comes new work by Shirley Purdie, a senior Gija painter. Those familiar with works from Purdie’s late, great teachers—Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and Purdie’s mother, Madigan Thomas—will recognise the hallmarks of Warmun painting. Hand-harvested ochres. Textural surfaces. White dotted outlines. Undulating representations of Country. Purdie is a student of the Elders who came before her—but she is also an innovator. From her Dreaming (Ngarranggarni) through to Catholicism and scenes from community life, Purdie powerfully mixes the traditional and the contemporary by telling new stories and approaching old stories in new ways.

Holly Greenwood was a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize with No phones allowed, 2024, an homage to The French House, a famous London pub. Visiting the Sulman with someone who happened to know that pub well, the look of recognition on his face was immediate—not just of the subject, but the distilled character of the place. That ability to evoke a sense of place with such an economical approach to painting is Greenwood’s gift to the viewer. With plenty of solvent and medium, her broad strokes of bright colours on black backgrounds manage to create scenes that appear loose and fluid, yet are tightly composed and rich with feeling.

Eliza Gosse’s paintings are odes to good design—from modernist homes to her most recent exploration of 1980s Miami. At Sydney Contemporary, Gosse will show a series of intimate and nostalgic gouache interiors. It is a favoured medium, with all her large canvases beginning as small gouache studies. The opacity of gouache is particularly well-suited to her palette of pastels, ochres, and browns, as it is to the mid-century design, architecture, and furnishings she depicts. Outlines rarely appear, yet there is a fine, illustrative definition to these works—like woodblock prints without a key block.

Since 2022, Dani McKenzie has turned her focus to city streets. With a photographic eye, she is adept at crossing the line, painting buildings and their occupants viewed from within and without. A Hopperesque voyeurism plays a part, but there are different motivations at play in McKenzie’s paintings, not least a consideration of what it means to live privately in the age of mass surveillance. And, always, there is sensitivity to light—from paintings at different times of day, to artificial bulbs of different temperatures across neighbouring facades.

This article was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
Sydney Contemporary
5 – 8 September 2024
Carriageworks, Sydney