ESSAY | Clean Edges and a Messy Studio: The Abstraction of Evie Adasal
Evie Adasal always wanted to paint, but she hesitated. “I graduated from art school in the ‘90s in photography and film,” she recalls. “When I was at TAFE, we had a really rough painting teacher, and she scared the shit out of me, so I thought I might stick to photography.” Years later, however, these […]
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Tagged abstract painting, abstraction, dopamine, Evie Adasal, Olsen Gallery, painting, Tai Mistuji
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PROCESS | Catherine Clayton-Smith
I recently left my home-studio on the Vaucluse clifftops in Sydney, with the whale and ocean views, and have set up a new studio in Collingwood, Melbourne. At the time of writing, I am deep in preparation for my solo exhibition with Olsen Gallery, in February 2026. Just like moving cities, beginning a new series […]
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Tagged Catherine Clayton-Smith, Olsen Gallery
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OLSEN Gallery at Sydney Contemporary
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 […]
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Tagged Dani McKenzie, Eliza Gosse, Holly Greenwood, Leila Jefferys, Olsen Gallery, Shirley Purdie, Sydney Contemporary
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Mika Utzon Popov
Jørn Utzon was guided by the ideology that architecture is not an external form, but a frame enclosing a collection of ritualised events. For Mika Utzon Popov art can also be a ritualised experience. He emphasises that the most profound encounters are designed and experienced as a procession where art, architecture, atmosphere, and environment conspire […]
Vipoo Srivilasa
I spoke with Vipoo Srivilasa about his upcoming exhibition at Olsen Gallery over beloved Zoom. The technology strongly embraced during the pandemic is not the only hangover of these past few years, but as Srivilasa playfully explores in this exhibition, so is the lingering sense of loneliness. The exhibition Always Better Together focusses on friendship […]
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Tagged Olsen Gallery, Rockhampton Museum of Art, Vipoo Srivilasa
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Dani McKenzie
In 2017, Dani McKenzie’s work was imbued with a strange nostalgic melancholy. She was undertaking a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and her paintings, which were based on found photography, were infused with mystery as neither the artist or viewer could know the history or the context of the images. They […]
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Tagged Dani McKenzie, MARS Gallery, Olsen Gallery
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Holly Greenwood
The central figure in Cats on toast, 2022, has their back to us, the checks on a flannel shirt giving perhaps the most telling clue to their character. A swoop of black oil paint in the centre of their head could be a bald patch; equally, it could be a section of dark hair; more […]
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Tagged Holly Greenwood, James Makin Gallery, Olsen Gallery
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John Young
The youngest of four siblings, John Zerunge Young spent his childhood on the southern side of Hong Kong, in an art deco granite house that was scarred with Japanese bullet holes from the Second World War. As a child, looking out from the balcony he painted views of the sea and the sun setting over […]
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Tagged John Young, Olsen Gallery, painting, photography
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Paul Davies: Belvedere Loop
In a previous essay for Artist Profile, Andrew Frost took recourse to Joan Didion when thinking about Davies’s relationship to place. “The great chronicler of Southern California,” as Frost describes Didion, is so deeply bound up with the West Coast of the US that she might be thought of as a constituent part of it, […]
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Tagged abstract painting, Olsen Gallery, painting, Paul Davies
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Stephen Bird
In his new exhibition at Olsen Gallery in May, Stephen Bird uses both paint and clay to explore the imaginary voyages of the mind; how far the narratives of real-life extend into mystic journeys. ‘Mare Incognitum’ captures the inner workings of a human mind, layered with Bird’s own experiences navigating the far-reaching corners of the […]
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Leila Jeffreys
In her first Australian solo exhibition in five years, Leila Jeffreys explores new territory.
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Tagged High Society, Leila Jeffreys, Olsen Gallery
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Sally Anderson
Sally Anderson speaks about how the deeply autobiographical, the metaphorical and the observed intertwine in her painting practice.
Marisa Purcell
Marisa Purcell’s new series of linen canvases hang like curtains, representing the way the brain erects definitive boundaries to construct reality.
