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NGA buys 'tough' Olsen
The Australian Finanical Review 26/08/2010
Katrina Strickland
The National Gallery of Australia has bought John Olsen’s Butcher’s Cart Deia de Mallorca. Painted by the 82-year-old artist in the past year, it depicts a meat cart he used to walk past while living in Spain in the 1950’s. The Canberra institution reserved the painting when it was shown at Sydney’s Tim Olsen Gallery earlier this year, and its purchase was approved last week by its governing council. It was for sale with a $650,000 price tag but the NGA is expected to have received a discount on this. NGA director Ron Radofrd confirmed the purchase this week. “He is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, he’s painting well, like a young man,” Radford said. “We have many early Olsen’s but nothing that he’s done very recently. We were keen to update our collection; he is one of our leading senior living artists.” Radford described the brown hued painting, which also features a dog that Olsen said used to sit atop the meat cart, as “pretty tough”. It was bought with proceeds from a $1.3 million pot of money raised over the past year to fund acquisitions for the gallery’s new indigenous art wing, entrance and function space, which opens next month. Most of that money has gone towards the purchase of new indigenous artworks, but Mr Radford said a couple of non-indigenous works were also purchased “and the John Olsen is one of them”. Butcher’s Cart was the centrepiece of an exhibition of works related to Spanish food, and Olsen’s time in the European country, that opened at his son’s gallery in March this year.