John Nixon: Exper­i­men­tal Paint­ing Workshop

Castle­maine Art Museum

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.

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