Catherine O’Donnell in 2025

Looking In: Abstract Views of Suburbia
19.07. - 16.08.2025

In her highly anticipated first major body of work in oil, Catherine O’Donnell focusses on the suburban architecture of 1960s south-west Sydney and its embedded narratives of nostalgia and identity. Through these paintings, she elevates everyday structures – weathered facades, rows of windows, quiet doorways – and transforms them into works of refined draughtsmanship and layered social complexity that reflect on memories of the ‘Australian dream’.

This series marks an exciting evolution in O’Donnell’s practice, using the richness of oil paint to explore the social complexity embedded within the suburban landscape. Each work invites the viewer to reconsider these quotidian sites and directs our attention towards their often overlooked beauty, revealing how the built environment carries stories of community, change, and belonging. O’Donnell’s paintings offer a thoughtful meditation on place as a living archive, where personal and collective histories intersect and endure.