Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste

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Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste celebrates the legacy and significant achievements of Margaret Olley AC—National Art School alumna and one of Australia’s most beloved painters—through the lens of the European artistic tradition intimisme, which honours the quiet poetry of domestic life and the interior world.

Drawing from significant public and private collections, Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste traces Olley’s preoccupations from early interiors to her later richly textured compositions featuring floral arrangements, antiques, and domestic objects. Each painting is more than a still life—it is a portrait, a sensory memory, and a trace of the artist’s personal world, animated by beauty.

Curated by NAS Gallery Manager and Senior Curator Katrina Cashman curator in consultation with author and curator Christine France OAM, the exhibition explores Olley’s oeuvre as it relates to place and relationships. Rather than maintaining a separate painting studio, she worked primarily in her own home and those of family and friends. While she occasionally painted landscapes, portraits, and sketched outdoors—particularly while travelling—her principal subjects were interior spaces, window views, and intimate tabletop arrangements, capturing the resonance of light, memory, and everyday experience.

Though working within intimiste traditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Olley led an unconventional life, rejecting traditional domestic roles. Her work was never static,…