Exhibition
John Olsen Limited – Limited Contemporary Prints
11 Nov 2025 – 29 Nov 2025
OLSEN ANNEXE
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Newcastle (1928 - 2023)
In 2001 Dr John Olsen was made an Officer in the Order of Australia (AO). In 1977 he was awarded the O.B.E. for services to the Arts and in 1993 he was awarded an Australian Creative Fellowship. He was also awarded the Wynne Prize in 1969 and 1985 amongst many other awards throughout his career.
ABOUT JOHN OLSEN
Adversity often centres us to work from our core. This exhibition represents a particularly difficult and emotional time for John with the decline and eventual passing of his wife Katharine. A day to day concern, he grappled with being present for her and maintaining his studio practice. One would thereby assume that John would entertain a lugubrious theme encompassing dark palettes and reflective metaphors of mortality. Paradoxically we see him taking refuge in the joyous genres of his life's work. This exhibition is a celebration of both John and Katharine's lives.
It is a rare privilege to grow from infancy to maturity within this vast body of work. In many ways, John's paintings have the ability to distort and play with time. The joyful immediacy of his mark conceals the gravitas that forms the bedrock of six decades of painting. Watching the work at firsthand, I can say that the iconic fluidity of his line, his seamless pleasure (and success) in life, and what seemed like a rolling cavalcade of great and major works of art took tremendous drive and concentration.
Its smudged, cadmium yellow face keeps reinventing itself in the forms of giant paella pans, ponds, inland lakes, swollen valleys and the adventurous line that could never draw a perfect circle. As he often described it, 'The line that takes itself for a walk'.
It is well known that my father likes to traverse the Australian interior from above. On my first aerial journey with him to Lake Eyre / Kati Thander, in my thirties, I saw the land through a different eye. Here was supposed desolate isolation, teeming with life. Here, as the intricate map, the delicate palette, I saw the winding sensuality of the pink salt flats, the energy of perpetually lapping waves. All that apprehension about the dry interior dissolved and here was a haiku and a hurrah. Such a flat land can only be accurately described from above and yet I feel John Olsen has done so much more than evolve a convex picture plane in macrocosmic detail. What he manages is the simultaneous experience of vast space: you?ve got to look at it all and that?s tough painting and it is contemporary.
John Olsen is not an abstract artist; he is one of the great evocative painters. His link to poetry is his other great strength. I feel he has been gifted in his ability to understand beauty and still praise the ugly, the uneven, the difficult. His work also spans and masters many disciplines. A passionate collector once hailed him 'the Picasso of Australia', a patently throwaway remark, and yet effectively like Picasso he has mastered and never faltered in any of his chosen mediums. Even ceramics. The idiosyncrasy of his mark is inherent everywhere.
People see pain as profound and pleasure as mildly suspicious, yet both are present in equal measure in the work of John Olsen, you just need to excavate a bit deeper.
Everything my father touches is full of passion, intensity, truth and curiosity. The child is always alive. All my life he's been watching, absorbing and doing much more than just taking notes. So often he has been known by his motto, 'I am in the landscape and the landscape is in me'. That line, over time, became indivisible with his artistic identity and in the process he changed the face of how we see this terrain. He changed the very essence of what modern landscape painting is by shrinking the sky, turning his back on conventional geometry, speaking his own language and always returning to the egg-yolk magnetic energy of the sun.
In death brings new life. This work is a celebration of human life and nature. Through melancholy there is subsequent rebirth and its reward is truth and substance in joy.
- Tim Olsen
JOHN OLSEN CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ
If you own, or have owned in the past, an original John Olsen work, please contact Kylie Norton, editor of the John Olsen
Catalogue Raisonné at editor@johnolsenartist.com
Exhibition
11 Nov 2025 – 29 Nov 2025
OLSEN ANNEXE
Artist Features
April 2017
Artist Features
March 2017
Film
Interview with John Olsen in his studio prior to the opening of Goya's Dog exhibition at the National Art School.
Film
Dinner held 21 January 2018 to celebrate John Olsen's 90th Birthday at OLSEN Gallery, Woollahra
Film
The most comprehensive display ever mounted on one of Australia's greatest living artists This exhibition surveys John Olsen's remarkable seven-decade career, including paintings, ceramics, tapestries and works on paper from collections across Australia. It features some of his most iconic and arresting works, including large-scale paintings of Sydney Harbour and Lake Eyre and his career-defining landscape series The you beaut country. Olsen is renowned for his energetic painting style and his lyrical depictions of the Australian landscape and its life-forms. The exhibition traces the development of his spectacular and idiosyncratic vision, highlighting his lifelong interest in the natural world and his continued pursuit to capture the Australian identity. A National Gallery of Victoria exhibition in association with the Art Gallery of NSW.
Film
John Olsen, is a lover of many things: people, food, literature, and the natural world. Above all, Olsen is a lover of art and life. Listen in as Olsen tells stories of his life, work and an enduring passion for capturing the spirit of the Australian landscape.
Related exhibition:
The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria
John Olsen: The You Beaut Country offers an unparalleled opportunity to examine Olsen?s consummate place in Australian art history. His You beaut country series, which followed his return to Australia in 1960 after three years travelling in Europe, began what would be a lifelong interest in representing the landscape and Australian identity. These works are presented alongside his more recent paintings, prints and watercolours, including those inspired by the filling of Lake Eyre. The exhibition reveals an artist who at 88 years of age has lost none of his passion for his subject matter, nor his creative vitality and retains a unique ability to capture the spirit of the Australian landscape.
Film
John Olsen is one of Australia's greatest living artists. Daily Review was fortunate to chat with exhibition curator David Hurlston and see Olsen's distinctive works which are on display at The National Gallery of Victoria Ian Potter Centre through until February 2017.
Film
Now at the age of 88, John Olsen has gone home. Arguably Australia's most successful living artist, he is back in the city of Newcastle where he grew up during the Depression. To honour the memories of his early life, he is about to embark on one of his most significant works. It is set to rival his acclaimed 'Salute To Five Bells' mural at the Sydney Opera House.
Philippa McDonald joined John Olsen on his nostalgic return to the Hunter.
Film
"At 85 years young, John Olsen may have created one of his most monumental paintings in a physically-demanding project, complete with dramatic health scare, that has re-energised him." – 7:30, ABC
Film
In March 2013, John Olsen, one of Australia’s greatest living artists, embarked on the second largest mural of his career. He was 85 years old.
In The King Sun, director Tony Williams and producer Anna Hewgill follow the progress of John Olsen’s mural from the arrival of the 8 blank panels to the transportation, delivery and installation of the giant painting in the Collins Square development in Melbourne.
The film is a record of a great Australian at work on possibly his final mural. It’s also an uplifting exploration of a life in art, and a reflection on mortality, optimism and happiness.
The filmmakers take us inside Olsen’s Southern Highland home where Olsen opens up about the eastern philosophies and techniques that have guided his practice, and we hear from Olsen’s wife, son and daughter. John Olsen is in the autumn of his life and in The King Sun he reflects on what he was like as a younger man. We flash back to archival footage of John as a young, vigorous and driven artist working on Salute to Five Bells, and winning the Archibald. And we see how much he has mellowed with time.
– ABC1
The King Sun: John Olsen screened Tuesday 17 June at 10pm on ABC1.
Film
John Olsen, Australia's greatest living painter talks to the ABC 7.30 report about his latest body of work Lake Eyre – The Desert Sea, Ruminations on a Empty Landscape. This latest collection of watercolours, a very personal reflection of an ever-changing landscape that Olsen has visited since the 1970's, depicts the results of the recent flooding to the area and the new life that follows. This episode features interviews John Olsen, his gallerist-son Tim Olsen, grandson James and two young artists Luke Sciberras and Guy Maestri fly across the Lake as well as an interview by Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Film
This Art Nation episode features John Olsen and the exhibition Culinaria with Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein. John Olsen discusses his theories on painting food, as his memories of travel and cooking melt together to celebrate food, art and good company. Rick Stein comments on the exhibition, whilst Jamie Oliver get's involved with cooking up a feast for a delighted artistic audience.
Film
We are blessed with the deliciously tasty Culinaria – The Cuisine of the Sun. An explosive feast that celebrates life and the human experience. Tim Olsen reflects on John Olsen's latest exhibition.
Film
Channel 9 Sunday Program
This wonderful documentary produced by Catherine Hunter and presented by Max Cullen investigates John's enduring passion for the Australian landscape. John revisits Lake Eyre after many years with artist and friend Tim Storrier and discusses his deep love for the desert. Cullen examines other environments that have shaped John's artmaking, including the years spent in Spain in the 1960s; Clarendon, SA and Sydney Harbour, Kings Cross and Hill End, NSW. Fascinating insights are provided by Edmund Capon and Barry Pearce, Art Gallery of NSW.
Archival footage of John teaching drawing at the Julian Ashton Art School and painting in the landscape.
Film
John Olsen's exhibition 'Salute to Sydney: Olsen at Eighty' opened to tremendous acclaim in November 2007 and signalled the official opening of the new Tim Olsen Gallery on Jersey Rd. Tim hosted a red carpet gala event that was attended by many Olsen devotees together with notable artists, actors, writers and television personalities.
John Olsen's exhibition 'Salute to Sydney: Olsen at Eighty' opened to tremendous acclaim in November 2007 and signalled the official opening of the new Tim Olsen Gallery on Jersey Rd. Tim hosted a red carpet gala event that was attended by many Olsen devotees together with notable artists, actors, writers and television personalities.
Long time friend and director of the Art Gallery of NSW Edmund Capon opened the exhibition that marks an important shift in Olsen's paintings from the vast dry interior to Sydney's harbour and beaches. In the excerpt of the evenings events John Olsen also reflects on his childhood spent on Sydney's shores that provides the central motivation for this beautiful collection of paintings.
Filmed and edited by Noah Hutchison of artcine.com.au
