Holly Greenwood’s landmark show at OLSEN Gallery presents a vision of a smoke-filled, beer stained Australiana which questions the places we call home. Chameleon is Greenwood’s third solo exhibition with veteran gallerist Tim Olsen since she joined the gallery’s stable in 2020. In recent years she has been a finalist in Sir John Sulman Prize and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, to name but two. However, for a young artist charting a rise to international renown, her work is heavily cemented in an Australian sense of place.
This most recent exhibition untangles the complex network of threads which tie the Australian pub and its patrons together in an intricate dance. Chameleons is set in a series of nondescript classic Australiana pubs. The distinguishing features of each locale have been washed away, we are presented into a refracted dreamlike world, a liminal Australiana of a past which no longer exists.
There is an undeniable sadness in her pieces, a sense of loss and of yearning. In Greenwood’s pubs, the figures’ faces are blurred, abstracted behind a watery layer of glass and alcohol, discombobulating the eyes and detaching the self from the world around them. Her subjects are atypical, absence is constant. A ghostly figure types on his phone whilst a pint warms on the counter, his transparent torso transforming him into a spectre, less solid than the brass railings that run the countertop.
Through her brushstrokes she conjures the work of key pillars of the field. Twombly, and Rauschenberg, but also Whiteley and Streeton, find their home in the complex constructions of Greenwood’s hands. They’re thick, gloopy, and viscerally textural. Each lump and bump, bruise and crack of paint on canvas tells a story of its own. The works feel lived in, the paint takes on the feel of the cracked leather chairs that Greenwood captures. Folded into her works are the spectres of the Australian landscape, and the global postmodern. They forgo mimetic representations of reality to fold in a history of the pub and of painting. The wobbly curves of faucets and awnings turn into a Twomblian language, curves and shapes an abstracted cursive, sharing the secrets of the pub. It isn’t clear if Greenwood’s pubs are real or fictive, one place or many, but this language links them all. Through mottled ivory taps and hazy chandeliers, these dingy bolt-holds turn into palimpsest of an all-encompassing Australian identity.
Her colours speak to the great American painter, Edward Hopper. Dusty greens are caught in a wash of pale-yellow halogen, like a fading stain on a long-forgotten wall. Akin to Hoppers seminal work Nighthawks, Greenwood looks at the fading image at the end of the night. The few lone customers who stayed to final call, caught in their own sadness, in a liminal space, caught by their own loneliness, small and isolated against an alien landscape.
Australia’s pub history has passed, fewer Australians are drinking than ever before, local pubs that were once vibrant hubs of community are now washed-out hollows. Pissed patrons and bleary betters lurk in corners, nursing a pint of alcohol that tastes like it was made 60 years ago. Yet, the belief in the pub remains, they are seen as the defining symbols of the Aussie larrikin, an crucial part of an Australiana that we are increasingly leaving behind. In recent years, how we consider an Australian identity has shifted dramatically.
In Trent Parke’s series, Minutes to Midnight, he turned to the Australian outback to consider ‘typical Australian’. Yet, where past artists had valorised the aussie farmer as a symbol of a tough and hardy aussie character, he instead focused on the pain and the hardship found in towns that were ever increasingly left behind as younger generations moved into the cities, and money was eternally seeping out faster than it came in. The pain and the struggle of those who stayed, and a toughness built from abandonment, not from a hard day’s work. Greenwood’s work finds purchase in the context of this new generation of Australian artists, those who are concerned with questioning, as much as celebrating, what it is to be Australian.
Her paintings are sizable, between 137x180cm and 138x266cm. They dwarf over the audience, placing them on a level, creating a window through which we become one of the weary boozehounds woven into the work.
Yet, there is a poetic love that beats in the heart of these works. Greenwood has tirelessly returned, again and again, to the hallowed, worn carpets of these Australian habitats. These figures are to be treated, not with contempt, but with care and compassion. She nurses her figures, as they, in turn, nurse their drinks. In Lost in the madness of it all, an ageless woman floats with a timeless grace towards the counter in a flowing dress. She is ethereal, akin to a taproom angel. Whilst in Chameleons, a young man stares longingly out a nearby window into an inky night. Greenwood approaches her subjects with tenderness and care, showcasing a poignant reflection on Australiana and times now past.
Chameleons is an exhibition that will resonate throughout the world. As the world continues to modernise at an ever-increasing rate, the local watering holes, beating hearts of community, whither and die as rent rises and profits wane. The same weary eyes which peer over discoloured glass rims in Sydney, stare belatedly from harshly illuminated airport bars and laser-lit night clubs across the world. Yet, there is something undeniably Australian in her piece. Show this to anyone across the country, and they will see a part of their home depicted on Greenwood’s canvas. She may be bound for international success, but Holly Greenwood’s work will always represent where she came from.
Chameleons by Holly Greenwood exhibited at OLSEN Gallery from 28th May to 21st June 2025.
