
David Noonan: Stagecraft
Art Gallery of Ballarat 2020
John Nixon, Experimental Painting Workshop
2017, English
Softcover, 105 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Castlemaine
Author: Emma Cox
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Castlemaine Art Museum, 19 March – 25 June 2017
Presenting a recent selection from Nixon’s Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), a project that began in London in 1978 and continues to this day. Rejecting narrative, realism and pictorialism which he sees as limitations on painting, Nixon’s EPW proposes an expanded, and expanding, definition via the principles of modernist non-objectivity, specifically, the monochrome, Minimalism and Constructivism, and dynamic approaches to their exhibition. In his employment of the ready-made object, made famous by Marcel Duchamp in the early 20th century, Nixon demonstrates an intuitive method of collecting, rationalising and repurposing the everyday into otherwise abstract works. The en masse presentation of this exhibition is a hallmark of the EPW, offering both a spectacular experience of the whole, while also giving emphasis to individual works as evidence of the progression of Nixon’s thesis on the open-ended possibilities for painting.
Art Gallery of Ballarat 2020
Published by Schwartz City 2020
Monash University Museum of Art 2018
Art Gallery New South Wales 2018
Common Editions 2017
Published by Schwartz City and Artspace 2017
Castlemaine Art Museum 2017
National Gallery of Australia 2016
Griffith University, Brisbane 2016
Distanz 2015
National Gallery of Victoria 2014
Heide Museum of Modern Art 2014
Triumph Gallery, Moscow 2014
Casa Asia 2014
Schwartz City 2014
Institute of Modern Art 2014
Schwartz City 2014
De La Warr Pavilion 2013
Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2013
Macmillan Art Publishing 2012
National Art School 2012
Verlag fur Moderne Kunst 2012
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2012
Artspace Sydney and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2011
Heide Museum of Modern Art 2011
Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Schwartz City 2011
The University of Queensland Art Museum 2010
Schwartz City 2010
Heide Museum of Modern Art 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art 2009
Schwartz City 2009
Detached Cultural Organisation and Tasmanian Art Gallery, Hobart 2009
Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2008
Christchurch Art Gallery 2008
Schwartz City 2008
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2006
Anna Schwartz Gallery 2006
Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2005
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2004
Charta 2004
University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane 2003
Collage, München 2003
National Gallery of Australia 2000
Hudson Hills Press 1994
Greenhouse 1987