Josh Frydenberg will be pleased. As the Treasurer was this month urging people to keep working past pension age, 91-year-old artist John Olsen announced an exhibition full of brand-new paintings.

Recent Works, open from December 12 at Sydney's Olsen Gallery, will show the artist generally regarded as "Australia's greatest living painter" is as prolific as ever after more than 50 solo exhibitions, an Archibald prize (in 2005), two Wynne prizes for landscape painting (1969 and 1985), and 1960's Spanish Encounter – the abstract expressionist masterpiece painted in a single feverish night that at the time divided the local art community like few works since.