Margaret Olley’s famously crowded world of flowers, fruit, bottles and bowls is being placed alongside one of the artists who helped shape it in a new exhibition opening at Tweed Regional Gallery on Friday.
Margaret Olley 2006
Photo: Christopher Shain ©The artist Courtesy Tweed Regional Gallery collection
Margaret Olley: Shapes of Stillness pairs works by the much-loved Australian painter with Natura morta [Still life], a 1956 work by Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose quiet, sparse still lifes Olley greatly admired.
The exhibition also includes Olley’s White still life from 1977, on long-term loan from the National Gallery of Australia, along with works borrowed from public and private collections across the country.
While Morandi found endless possibility in the careful arrangement of bottles and vessels, Olley filled her paintings with the clutter and colour of lived-in rooms.
Tweed Regional Gallery director Ingrid Hedgcock said the exhibition celebrated Olley’s ‘unwavering devotion to the genre of still life: to placement, proportion, light, form and the enduring presence of the everyday’.
‘We have received incredible support from private collectors and public institutions across the country,’ she said.
The exhibition also looks at how Morandi’s restrained approach influenced Olley’s own practice, despite the obvious differences in their visual worlds.
A panel discussion on Friday afternoon will bring together curator and editor Alison Kubler, National Gallery of Australia curator David Greenhalgh, museologist Sally Waterson and Margaret Olley Art Centre curator Emily Gray.
They’ll explore the two artists’ working lives and the extraordinary task of packing up thousands of objects from Olley’s Sydney home studio and recreating it in Murwillumbah.
Margaret Olley: Shapes of Stillness opens September 18 and runs until March 7, 2027.
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