It is Breeders' Cup weekend but the official Breeders' Cup artist is not to be found at Keeneland. Instead, Katie O'Sullivan is putting the finishing touches to her first exhibition in seven years, which opens in London on Monday. This is not a solo project. Entitled Connections, the exhibition is a joint-effort with the sculptor Charlie Langton, whose most famous pieces include the bronze of four-time Gold Cup winner Yeats which graces the paddock at Ascot.O'Sullivan's work is no less celebrated. Her paintings adorn the collections of almost every major owner-breeder in the land – and some of those far beyond. Enable, Battaash, Flightline and Kodiac are among the thoroughbred stars to have fallen under her scrutiny, but her subjects don't have to be famous or of the equine variety. A small portrait of a grumpy-looking gorilla is among those waiting to be framed, and he has been nicknamed Jamie, after O'Sullivan's husband, trainer Jamie Osborne.“That's how he looks when he opens his bill from Tattersalls,” O'Sullivan says with a grin. She appears to be remarkably calm with only days left to her major show and admits that she is “absolutely knackered, but I'm really excited”.O'Sullivan continues, “I never really want to stop work on them but it gets to a point where it's like Bake Off: please put down your utensils! You need to have them taken away from you. I can just keep going on and going on, but it's getting too close. I go to bed every night, and every morning when I wake up, I keep saying, 'It's fine, it's fine, I can do this.' And then I get to about three o'clock and I think, 'Oh my God, what have I achieved?'”She can do this of course. Over the past 45 years O'Sullivan has exhibited in London, New York and Hong Kong while remaining highly sought after for private commissions. Anyone who has observed a significant amount of her work over this time will likely have drawn the overriding conclusion that she just keeps getting better – and this exhibition only confirms that impression. “You learn so much when you're doing this kind of work, and I think it brings you on,” she says of the collection around her studio. Half of the work is already with the framer. A sneak preview of the remaining half has ensured that a trip to London to see the entire offering is now a necessity.As one might expect from an artist who has been surrounded by horses from her early years in Ireland and has for decades lived in the heart of Lambourn's 'Valley of the Racehorse', there are plenty of thoroughbreds on show. Some are recognisable, such as the sizeable canvas 'Legacy' which bears a montage of Dubai Millennium surrounded by some of his most influential male descendants, including Dubawi and Night Of Thunder. Smaller but no less significant for breeding enthusiasts is the stunning portrait of Urban Sea flanked by her sons Galileo and Sea The Stars. Then there are those paintings which are unbounded by celebrity, portraying in both keen detail and rushed blur the sheer speed and utter thrill of the race itself. Full Speed by Katie O'Sullivan In a departure from her own definitive style, O'Sullivan has produced several studies that she calls her “remix”. Based on the famous Munnings paintings of horses at the start of a race – a theme which the master of sporting art revisited on a number of occasions – she has cleverly put her own stamp on a scene which is both familiar and fresh at the same time. O'Sullivan says, “You know how a singing artist does a cover version and they kind of remix it. That's the whole idea, the remixing, painting this set of colours really beautifully, and then the others I want to be painted in a flat kind of way, like a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.”Along with Jamie the gorilla, there's a flock of individual bird portraits, the artistry in which is eloquently summed up by O'Sullivan's old college friend, the Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger, in his foreword for the exhibition catalogue.“These subjects offer a fantastic counterweight to the raw power of the track,” says Wallinger. “Through the fragile glazes of the finely decorated ceramic and thebright plumage of birds, Katie finds a different kind of quiet energy, painting the richtextures in a passion that harks back to her work with a porcelain restorer shortly after leaving college.“These works are often framed in gold leaf overlays which she deploys gloriously in her recent depiction of a chalk stream: it is the sun and all it reflects, returning us toLambourn and its river that feeds eventually into the Thames.”O'Sullivan views this exhibition with Langton as not merely a case of “just two artists sharing a space”, rather a collaborative approach across two and three dimensions. “I've tried to go step by step with what he's doing,” she says. “He's got a start and a finish and a turn [of a race]. He's also done a lion, so we're kind of matching subjects in 2-D and 3-D which will hopefully go together really well.”Of her own inspiration, she adds, “David Hockney was one of my tutors at Chelsea School of Art and he just said, 'I paint what I like.' And he wasn't being arrogant, he just meant, I like it so I want to paint it. And it's true. That's how I feel.”The exhibition's opening on Monday has meant that a trip to Kentucky was impossible for O'Sullivan, whose two Breeders' Cup paintings will adorn the covers of each day's race cards. “Jamie said that I was mad trying to do those and an exhibition, and of course I spent a long time doing them because I was aware that it's quite a big deal,” she says. Osborne and O'Sullivan have of course had their own Breeders' Cup experiences, most notably when Toast Of New York was beaten a nose by Bayern in the Classic in 2014.“Jamie's so stoic about things and he always says to me 'You win, you lose, there's another day.' And he's absolutely right but I could never be a jockey or a trainer because actually the losing is quite hard to bear,” she says. Katie O'Sullivan with daughter Saffie Osborne and Spot the pony Though the spotlight shifts to O'Sullivan this week, for much of the year it has been her daughter Saffie Osborne who has been the headline-maker, culminating in her historic triumph in the St Leger aboard Highwayman. The artist can summon none of her husband's stoicism when it comes to speaking about their youngest child and that day at Doncaster, and her eyes brim with proud tears as she says, “When Saffie won the Leger, it was one of those moments where I thought thank God we didn't win the Breeders' Cup, and that this was somehow payback. “[ARC CEO] Martin Cruddace had made Doncaster into kind of a party scene and Saffie said the atmosphere was incredible. She started crying two furlongs from home as she said she was going so well that she just knew she was going to win.”O'Sullivan has to take her daughter's word for that as on the day itself she was far away at David Howden's Cornbury Horse Trials.“It was just hilarious as there there was no mobile phone service in the tent we were in and there were loads of racing people trying to watch the race,” she recalls. “In the end, I said 'Let's just be quiet and think about winning.' Then suddenly somebody's phone rang outside and we heard that she'd won and the whole tent erupted. I felt slightly sorry for [eventer] Bubby Upton because she was jumping at the time and she won the class but everybody was talking about Saffie.”O'Sullivan admits to finding it sometimes terrifying to watch her daughter in action but says, “That's what she wants to do though, and her three brothers are talented in different ways – one is a film maker, one works in the metaverse and the other one in politics so we're a very diverse family. The boys are all very tall so there was no jockeying going on there which I'm pleased about, and I certainly didn't want to create a dynasty of trainers because it's such a tough job.”As she chats away, a four-pack of slumbering dachshunds line the studio floor along with a solemn-looking Irish water spaniel. Bad Bobby, the errant star of Jamie Osborne's amusing lockdown videos, remains in the house, the wayward whippet perhaps not to be trusted among the easels this close to an important deadline. O'Sullivan's eye is constantly drawn to a detail here or there that she would like to embellish before the framer tells her it is time to set down her brushes. Until then, she'll be up all hours, immersed in what is to her a pursuit of love. “I'm not just sitting here painting portraits,” she says. “I think it's fun to push the boundaries because racing is such a beautiful spectacle – the colour, the whole thing – it doesn't have to be just horses coming round the final bend at Cheltenham. I might get the 'quack quack oops' when people see the exhibition but taking the risk is all part of the excitement.”Connections is at Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BN from November 2 to 7, 10am to 5.30pm during the week and 10am to 12 noon on Saturday. The post From Keeneland to Piccadilly, Artist Katie O’Sullivan is Toast of the Town appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.