Sidney Nolan: Origins

This October, the Art Gallery presents the major exhibition Nolan: Origins, an in-depth survey of Sidney Nolan’s remarkable formative years in Australia when he developed one of the most distinctive modernist oeuvres in this country. The exhibition includes 150 exceptional works, spanning from the beginning of Nolan’s career in Melbourne in 1938, to 1953 when his move to the United Kingdom catalysed a new phase of his creative production.

During Nolan’s formative years, his search for ‘Australia’ as both a natural and a metaphysical realm emerged as central to his creative inquiry. Expanding chronologically, the exhibition also follows the places in which Nolan worked as he evolved his singular, enigmatic modernist language and sought defining national allegories. These include ‘Heide’, the bohemian enclave and farmland home of patrons John and Sunday Reed on the outskirts of Melbourne; the Wimmera region of central Victoria, where Nolan was stationed during the war; the sites and memories of his St Kilda childhood; the landscapes and legends of north-eastern Victoria that famously served as the setting for Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings; K’gari or Fraser Island in Queensland’s north where he travelled after the war; and outback New South Wales, Queensland and Central Australia which motivated a new and spectacular phase of his practice.

This essay offers an introduction to the phases of Nolan’s Australian practice, through the landscapes that motivated his creation of works which redefined perceptions of place and nation in Australia’s modern cultural imagination.