Sydney Nolan retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Wednesday, 24 October 2007 01:11

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - The Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Sydney Nolan – A New Retrospective, on view 2 November 2007 to 3 February 2008. This is the first major retrospective of Sidney Nolan’s paintings since his death in 1992. It presents an opportunity to unravel something of the artist’s enigma and understand his essential achievement across an entire career.

The breathtaking speed of execution and prolific output of Nolan – estimated to be many thousands of paintings – has always proven a dilemma for the many retrospectives during his lifetime, the last being organized by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1987 for the artist’s 70th birthday.

‘Sidney Nolan is the best known, the most familiar, name in the history of modern Australian art; indeed his name is synonymous with Australia. And yet he remains something of an enigma.’ - Edmund Capon, director Art Gallery of New South Wales 2007.

The exhibition features many of Nolan’s finest masterpieces; some 120 paintings gathered from public and private collections in Australia, London, the United States and France. Many have rarely been seen in public, thus contributing to a fresh experience for a younger generation, and perhaps rediscovery for those who feel they are already familiar with the artist.

‘Painting was the outer skin of Nolan’s thought process, formed with an often disconcerting momentum which revealed flashes of sheer genius. Inventiveness, lyricism and a strong sense of the theatrical; these are the keys to this survey, concentrating on the peaks of excellence.’ -Barry Pearce, curator of the exhibition, 2007

The paintings are displayed in strict chronology, underlining the evolution of Nolan’s vision from its genesis in Melbourne during the late 1930s to the UK half a century later. Each critical phase is represented, from the St Kilda and Wimmera themes, through the first Ned Kelly series, Central and Northern Australian landscapes and explorer subjects, African, Antarctic and European paintings, to Chinese and Australian-inspired abstractions.

Emphasis is given to the late, spray-painted, Chinese landscapes and abstractions, which in some ways are an echo of how Nolan began in the highly charged years of his adolescence. For, beneath the originality of his approach to landscape, nature and history themes over more than 50 years, there was an enduring passion for the purely formal possibilities of painting.

'Although this discovery of truth about Australia is an important element in his work, I think it can be overstated. For Nolan is not at all a factual artist. He is, on the contrary, a man of active and disquieting imagination, and one of the fascinating things about his work is its unpredictability.' - Kenneth Clark, 1961

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Published by Beagle Press, the catalogue includes a major essay by the curator Barry Pearce and contributions by Edmund Capon, Frances Lindsay and Lou Klepac, with Nolan’s own eloquent words woven throughout.