On display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Nolan: Origins is the first major exhibition dedicated to Sidney Nolan’s formative artistic years in Australia.
Bringing together more than 150 works, the exhibition spans the period from the late 1930s to 1953, when Nolan departed for London. It traces the creative breakthroughs that would transform Australian art and establish Nolan as a defining figure of modernism.
“Few artists have had a greater impact on how Australians see themselves and the landscape than Sidney Nolan. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the ambition, imagination and innovation of an artist whose work continues to resonate nationally and internationally,” said Art Gallery of New South Wales Director Maud Page.
From the beaches of Melbourne’s St Kilda to the Wimmera, K’gari (also known as Fraser Island), the inland regions of New South Wales and Queensland and the expanses of Central Australia, the exhibition follows Nolan’s travels across the continent and charts his creative evolution, revealing how the places he encountered fuelled a bold new vision of Australia. Together, these works showcase a remarkable period of artistic experimentation that continues to influence artists today.
In a landmark moment for Australian audiences, Nolan: Origins reunites the artist’s complete 27-painting Ned Kelly series in Sydney for the first time in more than 60 years. Rarely seen together, this celebrated painting cycle is presented as originally exhibited in 1948, in what was a defining moment in the development of modern Australian painting.
The exhibition also brings together some of Nolan’s most iconic works alongside some that are less well known, including significant works from public collections and rarely exhibited private loans from across the country.
Nolan: Origins reveals the extraordinary breadth of Nolan’s creative vision as a young artist. While the Ned Kelly series remains one of his defining achievements, the exhibition shows how the themes that would come to shape his practice throughout his career, including landscape, myth, history and identity, first emerged during his years in Australia.
“The works in Nolan: Origins are among the most inventive in Australian art and contributed to a transformative period in modern Australian culture,” said Exhibition curator and Art Gallery of New South Wales Senior Curator of Australian Art Denise Mimmocchi.
“Bringing together these enigmatic works gives a new generation of audiences the opportunity to encounter Nolan at the moment he forged his groundbreaking visual language. He drew on Australia’s landscapes, histories and legends to create paintings that continue to challenge and feed our cultural imagination.”
Sidney Nolan (born Melbourne 1917; died London 1992) is a pivotal modernist artist who redefined perceptions of place and nation in Australia’s cultural imagination.
With paintings that are bold in colour, striking in composition and forthright in technique, Nolan re-envisaged the landscape by exploring the histories, folklores and mythologies embedded in it, in works that include his now infamous series on the 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly.
While Nolan sporadically attended classes at the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Art between 1934 and 1936, his art education was mainly self-directed primarily through books on modern culture. His work in commercial art, from age 14, inspired his lifelong experimentation with unorthodox artistic methods and materials. From 1938, Nolan was supported by art patrons Sunday and John Reed.
Their house, Heide, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg (now Heide Museum of Modern Art), was a meeting place for the avant-garde group known as the Angry Penguins, named after the radical cultural journal. The
group included the artists Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd.
In 1940, Nolan held his first solo exhibition in Melbourne of radically abstracted compositions, designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and became a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society. Conscripted into the army in 1942, he spent two years in north-western Victoria, where he painted the local landscape and figures in a powerfully simplified style of intense colour and bold brushwork.
Deserting the army in 1944, Nolan lived under an assumed name; the following year, he began his iconic series based on the bushranger Ned Kelly that portrayed events leading to the much mythologised outlaw’s demise.
In these paintings, Nolan presented his most enduring pictorial motif of the black square, based on Kelly’s handmade armour. Superimposing this shape against the Australian landscape in his paintings, Nolan suggested how stories and myths can shape meaning and understanding of place.
Leaving Melbourne in 1947, Nolan travelled across Far North Queensland and K’gari, also known as Fraser Island, inspiring a series of paintings based on his observations of the island and the legends of Eliza Fraser who was shipwrecked there in 1836. Further travels in western Queensland inspired quintessential works that he exhibited as his ‘outback’ paintings.
In 1948, Nolan married Cynthia Reed and subsequently adopted her daughter, Jinx. The following year, they travelled from inland New South Wales to Central Australia, Arnhem Land, the Kimberley, the west coast of Australia and back to Sydney, inspiring pivotal paintings in his career. When he exhibited works from this period in Sydney in 1949 and 1950, critics claimed that he had redefined a vision of the continent.
Nolan left for London in 1951, before permanently relocating in 1953. While based in England, he travelled widely throughout his life, often returning to visit and exhibit in Australia. He continued to work on his early subject matter throughout his career, reprising his depictions of Ned Kelly, Eliza Fraser, and Burke and Wills.
Nolan was knighted in 1981 and made an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts (UK) in 1987 and a companion of the Order of Australia in 1988. He died in London in 1992 at the age of 75.
A season of public programs accompanying the exhibition will extend the experience beyond the gallery walls, with talks, tours, workshops, film screenings and music exploring his impact on Australian culture.
Accompanying the exhibition is a major new publication featuring fresh scholarship on Nolan’s early career and lasting influence on Australian art. It provides renewed perspectives on Nolan’s practice from leading curators, academics, artists and writers.
Nolan: Origins
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain (Sydney)
Exhibition continues to 7 February 2027
Entry fees apply
For more information, visit: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au for details.
Images: Installation view of the Nolan: Origins exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, featuring works by Sidney Nolan, all artworks © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio | Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly 1946, Ripolin enamel on hardboard, 90.8 × 121.5 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Sunday Reed 1976 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency | Sidney Nolan Bathers 1943, Ripolin enamel on canvas, 62.9 x 75.5 cm, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, bequest of John and Sunday Reed 1982 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency | Sidney Nolan Luna Park 1941, nitrocellulose lacquer on canvas, 67 x 84 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds provided by the Nelson Meers Foundation 2003 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency | Sidney Nolan First-class marksman 1946, Ripolin enamel and alkyd on hardboard, 90.2 x 121.2 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds provided by the Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation 2010 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency | Sidney Nolan Pretty Polly Mine 1948, Ripolin enamel on hardboard, 91 x 122.2 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1949 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency | Albert Tucker Portrait of Sidney Nolan 1954, printed c1998, gelatin silver photograph, Albert Tucker Photograph Collection, State Library of Victoria