
Perfect Illusion
“When people look at my work they think they’re so real, they’re portraits of […]
Read MoreBorn Melbourne, Australia 1955
Lives and works in Melbourne
Jan Nelson’s works exploit emotional, textural and chromatic intensity, oscillating between fear and power, complacency and dissent. Layered within the artist’s work is personal experience of her own formative years during the social, political and cultural tumult of the 1970s.
Nelson’s ongoing series, Walking in Tall Grass, is a sequence of hyper-real paintings of children and adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, painted in brightly saturated colour. Both alluring and disquieting, the dynamism of the paintings stems from the artist’s preoccupation states of change. The works are rendered with the gloss of advertising imagery, yet the children retain the vulnerability of their age. There are tensions present between photography and painting, the interior world of the children and their public presentation.
Jan Nelson graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1983. Her works are presented in major public collections in Australia including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Monash University Collection, Melbourne; Bendigo Art Gallery; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; GOMA / Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Nelson represented Australia at the XXV Bienal de São Paulo. In 2004 she was the recipient of the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria and in 2009 she won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery.
Jan Nelson
Black River Running
27th April – 26th May 2018
Anna Schwartz Gallery
Jan Nelson
Strange Days
31st August – 5th October 2013
Anna Schwartz Gallery
Jan Nelson
Marshland
3rd June – 2nd July 2011
Anna Schwartz Gallery
Jan Nelson
In The Pines
1st – 24th November 2007
Anna Schwartz Gallery
Jan Nelson
Walking in Tall Grass
4th – 20th December 2003
Anna Schwartz Gallery
Jan Nelson
Black River Running #13, 2019
oil on linen
75 x 59 cm
Jan Nelson
Black River Running #10, 2018
oil on linen
75 x 61 cm
Jan Nelson
Walking in Tall Grass, Betty, 2010
oil and liquin on linen
76 x 53.5 cm
Jan Nelson
Walking in Tall Grass, Bag, 2003
C‑type photograph
113.6 x 136.2 cm
Edition of 3
“When people look at my work they think they’re so real, they’re portraits of […]
Read MoreJan Nelson’s ten paintings of life-size figures hang sparsely in the gallery. Stripes of […]
Read MoreBlack River Running by Jan Nelson Jan Nelson grew up in the cultural tumult […]
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