Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting

6 Apr–16 Jun 2019

Main Exhibition Gallery
Free

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the exhibition contains images and voices of deceased persons.

Download Wall Labels >

EXHIBITION COLOURS BY DULUX

Vivid White

 

Reflecting the complex dynamic between historical traces and speculative futures in Tom Nicholson’s drawing, sculptural and social practice, Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting is the first large-scale exhibition to survey the scope of the artist’s practice. Initially trained in drawing, a tradition that deeply informs his practice, Tom Nicholson (born 1973, Melbourne) is one of the most prominent Australian artists on the international stage. For Nicholson, the medium of drawing has become a way of connecting his work to wider cultural histories, focussing on the relationship between actions and their traces, and the imagination of new, as-yet-unrealised cultural forms.

A concurrent motif that recurs in Nicholson’s work is the figure of the monument, and an engagement with its weight, authority and persistence, and, on the other hand, its ability to be questioned, reconfigured and reimagined. Working with historical materials and the visual languages of art and politics, Nicholson creates possibilities for new kinds of monuments and picture-making, informed by listening, taking account and giving voice to others, with an insistence on acts of imagination, solidarity and justice.

The verticality of the monument is also set against the horizontality of landscape, which is referenced in the panoramic and cartographic form of much of Nicholson’s work. The figure of the landscape, and significance of land and country, bears an inevitable relationship to the roles of place and displacement, inscription and movement, exile and homecoming that course through the artist’s work.

This dialogue between the horizontality of landscape and the verticality of monuments conjures, as Mihnea Mircan describes in a new publication, a sense of ‘lateral vertigo’, manifest at ACCA as intersecting strata of images, texts, and cultural histories that make up Nicholson’s practice – and the structure of the exhibition itself – in a complex dynamic between commemorative and speculative image-histories.

Curated by ACCA’s Artistic Director Max Delany, the exhibition includes key projects by Nicholson dating from 1999 to the present, along with newly commissioned work. Accompanying Tom Nicholson’s survey exhibition is a major new monograph published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, in association with ACCA, Melbourne and IMA, Brisbane. Tom Nicholson: Lines towards Another, edited by Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes, includes an introduction by Aileen Burns, Max Delany and Johan Lundh, along with an ambitious collection of essays by leading Australian and international writers, art historians and cultural theorists, including: Amelia Barikin, Tony Birch, Brigid Crone, Anthony Gardner, Helen Hughes, Anneke Jaspers , Ryan Johnston, John Mateer, Mihnea Mircan, Grace Samboh and Ann Stephen.

Tom Nicholson’s work has been exhibited in major international exhibitions including the Gwangju Biennale, 2018; Biennale of Sydney, 2006 and 2018; The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017; Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, UK, 2016; Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, 2015; the Qalandiya International, West Bank and Gaza, 2012, 2014 and 2016; Shanghai Biennale 2012; among others. He is a Senior Lecturer at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, and is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Besen Family Foundation, Gordon Darling Foundation, and exhibition donors Bruce Parncutt AO and anonymous.

Watch the artist interview

 

Listen to the podcast series for this exhibition

Featured works

Tap on a image to find out more

Artists

Tom Nicholson