Six Sidney Nolan artworks to see at Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sidney Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales surveys the formative decades of Australia’s most inventive modernist, tracing his journey from the late 1930s through his London departure in 1953. Curated by Denise Mimmocchi, the show foregrounds the artist’s obsession with place, myth and the stories that shape a continent’s identity.
The wartime canvas Kiata marks a turning point, where the conscripted painter turned his spare hours into a bold landscape that bridges abstract concerns with a newly discovered love of the Australian light. The work signals Nolan’s shift from studio abstraction to an outward, almost plein‑air sensibility.
Memories of his Melbourne childhood surface in Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda, a frenetic, ant‑like swarm of figures that capture both the energy of a burned hall and the anxiety of a world at war. The scale and intensity of the piece illustrate how personal recollection and historical tension intertwine in his practice.
The legendary Ned Kelly series, born from family stories and desertion, re‑imagines the bushranger as a rebel poet. The iconic helmet slit frames the landscape, while paintings such as Quilting the armour reveal tenderness and a hidden nod to Nolan’s own alias, Robin Murray, through a solitary red robin.
A year of travel across central Australia produced stark, sun‑bleached canvases where Nolan’s use of quick‑drying Ripolin yields saturated reds and clarified desert light. These works challenge the notion of the interior as a “dead heart,” presenting instead a vibrant, living country informed by Indigenous connections.
In the early 1950s Nolan turned to biblical myth, most strikingly in Temptation of St Anthony, where demons, goannas and an angel with horns roam an Australian desert. The painting fuses European religious narrative with the stark Australian landscape, epitomising the exhibition’s core idea: myth and place are inseparable.
Together these six key works and surrounding pieces invite viewers to reconsider how Nolan’s personal history, wartime experience and fascination with legend forged a uniquely Australian visual language that continues to resonate today.