The City of Fremantle Art Collection will present a major retrospective exhibition at Walyalup | Fremantle Arts Centre along with an illustrated book about the art practice and creative life of celebrated Fremantle based artist Theo Koning (1950-2022).

Theo Koning was an extraordinary artistic talent, champion of Arte Provera and a much-admired self-effacing ‘creative type’ of his generation.

This is the first comprehensive exhibition of Koning’s art in Australia. With the assistance of his friends and family, and with the unanimous support of leading WA art curators, writers and culture academics the project is projected to be a thorough record of Koning’s work and impact on the visual arts of WA. The exhibition will draw upon the distributed collection of Koning’s work across private, corporate and public collections nationally.

The exhibition will feature over 90 works and will include artworks spanning his entire oeuvre over fifty years. It will showcase examples of large-scale assemblage and installation, sculpture, series of paintings, drawings and print editions; including artist books, poetry, collage and examples of mail out and political art; A/V screenings of his Super 8 and 16-mm films and video and image poetry and performances posted to Instagram.

The exhibition will trace the artist’s career across 5 decades in WA, through his interstate projects, collaborations, art protests and community partnerships, engagement with progressive art organisations Praxis, Sculpture Association of WA and Mark Howlett Foundation, commercial gallery sector clientele and collectors, and through numerous garden design projects, and exhibition venues in Australia and overseas including at Basel Atelier Mondial studio residency in 2015-2019.

Theo Koning had a creative eye for special things in the stuff that people discarded. He was an expert in uncovering value from an infinite field of street junk, skip bins, tips, op shops and school fetes to assemble substantive stores of materials and make works of art that relate equally to the metaphysical and material worlds.

The exhibition has been undertaken following extensive research and development by the Curator City of Fremantle Art Collection Andre Lipscombe following Koning’s death in 2022.

“Theo Koning should be a household name in Western Australia. He was widely known in art circles and greatly appreciated as an instinctive and natural maker. He enjoyed a finely attuned manual skill set which he applied to adapting found materials of all kinds, to meet an exacting creative sensibility. He was a wry narrator of the human condition, and he undertook an artistic life not as a journey but a playground, a life in which to find new ways to explore life experiences through the joy of creative experimentation.” says Andre Lipscombe.