The Lost Modernist: Michael O’Connell
Michael O’Connell, Pandemonium (detail), c.1930.
The work of one of Australia’s most significant and often forgotten modernist textile designers, Michael O’Connell, will be showcased in the exhibition The Lost Modernist taking place at the Bendigo Art Gallery.
The exhibition brings together close to forty significant textile works from the 1920s and 1930s that helped shape the development of modernism in Australia.
Born in Cumbria in 1898, O’Connell moved to Australia in 1920 and over the next seventeen years became a critical member of the burgeoning Modernist movement in Melbourne, primarily through his innovative and dynamic textiles.
According to the Bendigo Art Gallery, O’Connell’s hand-block-printed fabrics revolutionized Australian textile design and laid the foundations of its future development.
The Lost Modernist will include photographs of O’Connell in his studio as well as personal notebooks, sketches for designs, exhibition catalogues and diaries. An interior of the period will also be created.
The exhibition is co-curated by professor of architectural history at Melbourne’s RMIT University and director of the RMIT design archives, Harriet Edquist, and Bendigo Art Gallery senior curator Tansy Curtin.