Being There – Kathleen O’Connor in Paris (expired event)

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the death of New Zealand-born painter Kathleen O’Connor (1876-1968), who settled in Paris in 1908 and embraced the bohemian lifestyle in the Artists’ Quarter.

The Artists’, or Latin Quarter, on the left bank of the River Seine was in the first decades of the 20th Century at the heart of international avant-garde literary, artistic and intellectual movements. Kathleen O’Connor moved in the fringes of these circles, studied painting and established networks with many other ex-pat Australian and New Zealand female artists, including Ethel Carrick Fox, Thea Proctor and Bessie Gibson.

Opening Event
Thursday, 13 September, 6:30pm, FREE

Kathleen O’Connor was an artist with a strong family connection to Fremantle and WA, who independently embarked on a creative life far removed from her antipodean roots, to influence the trajectory of painting, fashion and decorative arts in Australia. Kathleen O’Connor was forced to return to Perth in 1955 when she was almost 80, and struggled for recognition in her home town.

This exhibition brings together for the first time recent acquisitions and the entire Kathleen O’Connor holding of drawings and paintings gifted to the City of Fremantle by Sir Ernest Lee Steere in 1978 on behalf of his mother, the artist’s sister. The Kathleen O’Connor Gift established the largest holding of the artist’s work in a public collection in Australia.

The exhibition includes loans of artworks and ephemera from public and private collections and is presented to coincide with the release of a new non-fiction narrative by Amanda Curtin, Kathleen O’Connor of Paris, published by Fremantle Press