Sidney Nolan was an Angry Penguin: that is, he belonged to a circle of avant-garde artists and writers in Melbourne who wanted to cultivate a distinctively Australian modernism. Nolan was especially gifted when it came to merging Surrealist and Expressionist ideas and techniques with mythic imagery; his Ned Kelly series (1946–47), in which the bushranger appears as a stack of black oblongs with cartoon eyes roaming with a rifle around the Outback, brings a comic, absurd dimension to the much-mythologised figure while not playing down his hunger for violence. The Art Gallery of New South Wales brings together all 27 paintings from this cycle and many other paintings Nolan made from his twenties to his mid thirties, before he left for the UK (3 October–7 February 2027). It’s a rare chance to see how he captured the unrelenting strangeness of rural Australia, and how he applied lessons from both Renaissance and modern art to give the continent a new artistic voice.
Find out more from the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s website.
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