For Anzac Day this year, we focus on Palms, Anzac Square, a work depicting Brisbane’s Anzac Square looking towards the War Memorial by Betty Quelhurst (17 September 1919-2008). We also profile this and other Brisbane landmarks by Quelhurst in the Gallery’s Collection alongside contemporary photography for an artists viewpoint. Focusing on recording life in Brisbane…
Margaret Olley moved to Brisbane when she was 12 and was a boarder at Somerville House school for girls in South Brisbane from 1937 to 1940 where they were quick to recognise Olley’s talents and recommended to her mother that she attend art school. Her friend and fellow artist Margaret Cilento also began formal art…
Continue reading » “Go back in time to Margaret Olley’s Brisbane”
Gifts made to the Gallery through a Will have been central to the development of QAGOMA’s Collection. Since 2018, a generous bequest received from Helen Dunoon has helped to bolster the Gallery’s holdings of works on paper. Here, Lucy Whyte highlights some of the acquisitions made possible by this support. Over the last three years,…
Continue reading » “A legacy of works on paper: The Helen Dunoon Bequest”
Margaret Olley (1923-2011) was deeply grateful when in 1962 her close friend, poet and art critic Pam Bell (1928-1995) invited Olley to visit her family home at Aroo station in Boonah (illustrated), just west of Ipswich near Brisbane. It provided Olley with new subject matter for a number of regional landscapes and homestead portraits, not…
Continue reading » “Margaret Olley follows Conrad Martens in painting the McPherson Range”
Margaret Olley’s friendships with artists are chronicled in their pictures of her, such as William Dobell’s 1948 Archibald Prize–winning painting, works by Russell Drysdale and Jeffrey Smart and, much later, Ben Quilty’s 2011 Archibald Prize–winning portrait. No other subject has won the Archibald twice (self-portraits by Brett Whiteley and William Robinson aside), and the 63-year…
Continue reading » “Margaret Olley: A muse and artistic subject for others”
Painting flowers had long been considered a feminine subject. With the examples of Marian Ellis Rowan (1848–1922) and Margaret Preston (1875 1963) behind her, Margaret Olley (1923–2011) can be seen as part of the continuing tradition. But she was more than that. Still life and interior painting were significant genres during the 1930s for both…
Continue reading » “Margaret Olley: The subject is wildflowers”
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.