John Olsen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales - Sydney, Australia

During an early sojourn in Europe between 1957 and 1960 Australian painter John Olsen absorbed the influences of among others, Hayter, Dubuffet COBRA artists Lucebert, Jorn and Alechinsky, and Tapies. His work also present to views affinities with Far Eastern art and demonstrates an interest in literature, particularly similar Anglo-Celtic writers as Yeats, Thomas, Joyce and Beckett. on the other hand this retrospective of his paintings revealed an oeuvre that could solitary have been produced within the Australian words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following He has taken as his chief bring under rule the Australian landscape, and he has given expression to aspirations that permeate a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Australian culture. His acute evocations of local wildlife, Aussie larrikins (roguish outlaw types) and the immense, intractable landmass itself constitute an art that is regional on the other hand in no sense provincial.

A typical Olsen painting combines an implied aerial view with an ambiguous and seemingly unpremediated figuration. His characteristically quizzical line and irregular squiggles and dots deftly pay back countless organisms, large and minute. Their environment is conjur end loosely brushed and stained expanses of color (on canvas or hardboard) that are lock openered to natural light. flat when he is referring to the outback landscape, usually noted for its austerity and inhospitality, Olsen's imagery bears with life. Yet the same lines sometimes read as geological mappings. In Olsen's work there is no foreground/ middle ground/ background schema, nor any sign of European landscape's touch with "human scale." Instead he exercises simultaneously the contrary vantages of naturalist and geographer or, to deposit it another way, the viewpoints of frog and eagle.

Olsen is a master watercolorist--witness a series of large works (often around 8 feet high) upon Japanese torinoko paper with titles of that kind as The Rookery, Dying bight Bed and Owls at Cooper's small bay These exquisite and humorous paintings bear comparison with the best of the Zen sumi tradition without at any time striking a false note. Another collection of paintings, begun in 1987 and dominated through tar blacks and heavy umbers, adumbrates themes of Spanish village life, literary respects and autobiographical probings, all in a tragicomic style A purely Olsen touch appears in the darkness that is animated through scrawly images in Donde Voy? Self-Portraits in twinkling of an eyes of Doubt: a squidgy little fried ovum hovering in space where single of the figure's genitals would be in a fuller rendering, consigns playfully to Velazquez, a emblem of redemption and a particular not-quite-cooked bit of breakfast.

Olsen's work has not notwithstanding been seen in the U still this retrospective would more than grasp its own at any of our major venue [For illustration, diocese "Report from Australia," p. 41]

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group