John Olsen

In 1957, backed by Sydney businessman Robert Shaw and art critic Paul Haefliger, Olsen travelled to Europe. He studied printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris and spent two years in Deià, Mallorca. There he absorbed the influence of the Tachist painters, the CoBrA group, Antoni Tàpies, Jean Dubuffet, and Joan Miró. These encounters fundamentally altered his approach - away from conventional representation and towards a charged, gestural mark-making rooted in direct experience of place. His breakthrough work was "Spanish Encounter" (1960), painted in a single night, which carried the urgency of his Spanish years into a distinct visual language.

Back in Australia, Olsen developed the series of paintings known as the "You Beaut Country" landscapes, which proposed a very different vision of the Australian bush from the dry, melancholic tradition associated with Russell Drysdale. Where Drysdale's outback is still and defeated, Olsen's is teeming, looping with life, rendered in arcing lines and intense colour. He received a commission to paint the Sydney Opera House mural "Salute to Five Bells" (1973), a work inspired by Kenneth Slessor's elegy for a friend drowned in Sydney Harbour, which became one of his most visible and enduring public statements.

His work is held in major Australian public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and numerous state and regional galleries. He won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting twice, in 1969 and 1985, and the Sulman Prize in 1989. In 1977 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2001 Officer of the Order of Australia. He won the Archibald Prize in 2005. He died on 11 April 2023 at his home near Bowral, New South Wales, at the age of 95.

At auction, Olsen is among the most actively traded Australian painters of the 20th century. His recorded auction high is approximately USD 738,885 for "Seafood Paella" at Smith and Singer, Sydney, in 2019, and his works have consistently attracted strong bidding at the major Australian sale rooms. The 14 items linked to this name in the Auctionist database were sold at Svendborg Auktionerne in Denmark, and reflect a different John Olsen - a Scandinavian artist whose small bronzes and drawings sold in the range of DKK 1,000-2,600. The Australian painter's market is concentrated in Sydney, Melbourne, and select international sale rooms, where prices for important works regularly exceed AUD 500,000.