World-class Wangaratta-born artist in local exhibition
Published on 12 August 2024
Internationally acclaimed, Wangaratta-born artist, Fran O’Neill is exhibiting at Wangaratta Art Gallery for the first time this August. Her exhibition Crossing showcases new and recent paintings completed over the past decade, which vibrate with bold colour and luminous energy.
The exhibition explores the artist’s appreciation of home, and what that means when living away. As she explains: “I often think all the work that I made whilst in New York was really a yearning to touch, feel and sense the light and smell of Australia, a longing to be in the bush.”
Working predominately in large-scale abstract painting, Fran O’Neill uses her arms and hands to create unique, layered, gestural marks in what New York art critic David Cohen described as “beefy, boisterous forms”, her paintings have a “voluptuous sense of bodily connection.”
Fran O’Neill is well-known in the New York art world, regularly exhibiting and teaching. Her paintings are included in collections across the USA, UK, and Australia and in 2007 she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for her work. She has taught at the prestigious New York Studio School, the Pratt Institute, and recently the National Art School, Sydney.
Australian arts writer Miranda Hine describes O’Neill as an artist “whose understanding of colour, composition, texture and light has been honed over decades … ” and who now “sits within a cohort of international contemporary abstract painters”, referring to O’Neill’s inclusion in the 2016 group exhibition Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Florida.
Wangaratta Art Gallery is honoured to host this world class artist for her first exhibition in her place of birth. Wangaratta Art Gallery Director, Rachel Arndt is thrilled to host O’Neill’s work:
“It is a sincere pleasure that Fran agreed to show her work here, in her hometown for her own community. Crossing takes its starting point from Fran’s early seminal work of the same name, now in the Wangaratta Art Gallery collection. Initially the work and now the exhibition, Crossing traces Fran’s longing for home in those years as an ex-pat, the development of her colour palette and the new work created in response to the quality of light and atmosphere of her picturesque Cheshunt studio.”
Crossing will be opened by the CEO of the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Melinda Martin, on Friday 23 August from 5pm at Wangaratta Art Gallery. To book your free ticket, please visit: www.wangarattaartgallery.com.au
The launch will also celebrate the opening of Art as Sanctuary an exhibition by artists from Artmania Wangaratta, an all-inclusive arts space for people of all abilities, presented in Gallery 2. All welcome.
What Crossing exhibition.
When 17 August to 10 November 2024, Tuesday – Sunday, 10am - 4pm.
Where Gallery 1, Wangaratta Art Gallery, 56 Ovens Street, Wangaratta.
For further information, please contact Gallery Director, Rachel Arndt on r.arndt@wangaratta.vic.gov.au