Sidney Nolan

The speed at which Sidney Nolan worked, and the expansiveness of his production, has always presented something of a dilemma for the retrospective defining of his genius. John Olsen once described Nolan as having a wild eye, by which he was able to glimpse a motif with the instantaneousness of a lens shutter, spawning a bewildering plethora of images, from ephemeral sketches to large-scale compositions, many of which have become indelible icons of 20th century Australian art. This retrospective, consisting of approximately 116 paintings, will be presented in chronological order, underlining the evolution of Nolan's vision from its genesis in St Kilda during the late 1930s to the United Kingdom half a century later. This will allow a clear view of where his intentions took him with quite startling logic in his last years, when he needed to look backwards to move forward, pinpointing ideas that had always remained deeply imbedded in his painterly consciousness.