John Nixon

Biography

John Nixon (1949—2020)

John Nixon was born in 1949 in Sydney and moved as a child with his family to Melbourne, where he lived for most of his life. He attended Preston Institute of Technology in 1967–68 and in 1969–70 studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where he received a Diploma of Art. His first exhibition was held in 1973 at Pinacotheca, one of the few private galleries in Australia committed to showing avant-garde work. In the decades that followed, Nixon became an influential figure in contemporary Australian art and established a significant international profile.

From the commencement of his art practice in 1968, Nixon was dedicated to an experimental approach and developing the ideas of radical modernism, with important reference points in Minimalism, Constructivism, the monochrome, non-objective art and the readymade. His earliest influences were Minimalism and Conceptual Art, movements then questioning the terms of artistic practice, and it was through the writings of the minimalists that he first learned of Russian Constructivism in the late 1960s.

Having used the name Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW) informally for several years, Nixon adopted it in 1990 as the overarching title for his extensive painting practice dating back to 1968. In its entirety, the EPW would express Nixon’s underlying philosophy and sustained inquiry into the nature of art—its making, display, and relation to daily life. He conceived it as ‘not a physical work- shop, but an intellectual proposition’, one that could be realised anywhere in the world using locally available materials and objects.

Though best known for his paintings, Nixon also developed significant lines of work in printmaking, collage, drawing, photography, film and experimental music, as well as in publishing and graphic design. Alongside these, Nixon also generated collaborative performance projects in the fields of music, theatre and dance, and was active as a writer, curator and educator.

During his studies in 1967, Nixon saw the exhibitions Two Decades of American Painting and Marcel Duchamp: Works from the Mary Sisler Collection at the National Gallery of Victoria, encounters that proved formative to his engagement with abstraction and the readymade. In 1968, with large-scale Colour Field painting at the forefront of international art, Nixon began making small works called Block Paintings. Following this, during the 1970s, Nixon produced predominantly conceptual language-based works and began corresponding with members of the Art & Language group—Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth, and Mel Ramsden—participating in their exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975.

While living in London for six months in 1978, Nixon held his first solo exhibition outside Australia at Barry Barker Ltd—a one-person operation run out of a small room in a city office building. From this experience, among others (Nixon cited the do-it-yourself ethos of punk music), he began to see new possibilities for working independently of the conventional gallery system. Returning to Australia in 1979, Nixon founded Art Projects, a gallery in central Melbourne, where he exhibited both his own work and that of his contemporaries. The gallery operated for six years, closing in December 1984, and was run with the assistance of artists Jenny Watson (then his wife), John Matthews and Peter Tyndall. Nixon also served as director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane (1980–81), where he lived throughout this period, continuing to oversee the Art Projects program in Melbourne with Tyndall’s support.

During these years, Nixon also began creating his own itinerant exhibition venues, including the Institute of Temporary Art and the Art Projects Annex Program. These initiatives marked his emergence as an independent curator, editor and publisher, and led to the establishment of spaces such as V-Space in Melbourne (1980) and Q-Space in a disused Brisbane warehouse (1980–81). He regularly co-exhibited at Q-Space with Robert MacPherson and invited artists to present one-day shows, later extending the program to Q-Space Annex in his apartment living-room. These projects generated unofficial exhibitions in cafes, car parks and outdoor settings, recalling the constructivist and dadaist use of everyday spaces for artistic experimentation. Nixon later noted that the idea of short-duration exhibitions reflected his interest in punk and experimental music: ‘The “gig” exists in a short time period—you either go to see it now or you miss out.’ Nixon returned to Brisbane for three years between 1987 and 1989, moving to Sydney in 1990. Relocating to Melbourne in 2001, he built a large studio at his Briar Hill home, where he lived with his wife Sue Cramer and daughter Emma Nixon until his death in August 2020.

With painting the central focus of his practice, Nixon developed several ‘side projects’ that ran parallel to his main body of work and operated under names distinct from his own. In 1979 he founded Anti-Music, describing it as a ‘logo’ for a small group of artists untrained in music who, over the next four years, would use a simple cassette recorder to produce 406 one-off tape recordings. Immediate and unrehearsed, these works fuse industrial sounds and mechanical rhythms with pop, disco and classical influences. The following year, Nixon established The Society for Other Photography in Brisbane, using an SX-70 Polaroid camera to pursue what he called ‘a radical/amateur approach to photographic practice’. He exhibited his own photographs together with selected second-hand Polaroids sourced through the Trading Post. In 2007, Nixon founded The Donkey’s Tail, an ‘experimental, abstract, free noise, improv, garage ensemble’. Initially focused on making CD recordings, the group later performed at various art and music venues. The project evolved into The Donkey’s Tail Klang Theatre, which present- ed two performances within Nixon’s Melbourne Art Theatre (2018–19), a program he curated at RMIT University featuring nine plays by Melbourne artists in the spirit of early twentieth-century avant-garde theatre.

Nixon’s practice was underpinned by his view of art as a shared enterprise. He fostered friendship and exchange among like-minded artists, both in Australia and abroad, establishing connections in London, Zagreb, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Auckland, Wellington and Zurich, among other places. Publishing became a key vehicle for this exchange, including the one-page Pneumatic Drill: A Newsletter on Anti-Music, 1981–83, which featured contributions from Anti-Music members, and several bound photocopied or offset-printed anthologies of artists’ pages. Among these were Notes on Art Practice, 1982; Young Blood: Notes on Art Practice, 1983; Kerb Your Dog magazine, 1990–93, co-edited with John Young; Z International Art, 1995–2002; and Material, 1998, a one-page publication featuring a different artist in each edition. Nixon also published music under several of his own labels, including Circle Records (1996) with NZ artist Julian Dashper, and Freeway Sound (1999) with Marco Fusinato, a fellow member of the noise-mu- sic duo Solver. He later founded Document Records (1998) to release music by Danish artists Albert Merz and Poul Gernes, and White Circle Records (2007) for The Donkey’s Tail recordings.

Nixon exhibited extensively, holding numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career and participating in group exhibitions across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, North America and Asia. His first solo public gallery exhibition was held at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide in 1975. He participated in the Third Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue in 1979, and in later Sydney Biennales in 1988 and 1990. In 1982, Nixon represented Australia at documenta 7, Kassel, Germany (with Imants Tillers), having been invited by Germano Celant, the Italian art historian and curator closely associated with Arte Povera. He also took part in major international surveys of Australian art, including ANZART: Australian and New Zealand Artists in Edinburgh, presented as part of the 1984 Edinburgh International Festival; Australia: 9 Contemporary Artists at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1984; and Australian Visions: 1984 Exxon International Exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1984–85. His first solo exhibition in the United States was held at Wooster Gardens, New York, in 1992.

Solo exhibition highlights since 2000 include Piero Manzoni / John Nixon: Works from Herning/Denmark, Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark, in 2000 (which travelled to venues in Germany); Works 1968–2000, Stiftung für konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany, in 2001; EPW 2004, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2004; Paintings 1980 / 1990 & Paintings 2015, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, in 2016; John Nixon: Various Works 2013–2017; Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany, in 2017; John Nixon: Abstraction, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, also in 2017; and Groups + Pairs 2016–2020, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, in 2020. Since Nixon’s death, the Estate of John Nixon has continued to exhibit his work, with highlights including John Nixon in the Lyon Collection, Lyon Housemuseum, Melbourne, in 2021; and John Nixon—Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints, Geelong Gallery, Victoria, in 2023.

Nixon’s works are held in the National Gallery of Australia and in every state muse- um in Australia, and in several other Australian public collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, The University of Sydney, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, and Monash University, Melbourne. His work is also represented in numerous international museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland; Foire National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Stiftung für konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany; The Artists Museum, Łódź; HEART—Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Esberg Art Museum, Denmark; Espace d’art contemporain, Demigny, France; National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Seoul; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand. Major private collections that hold his work include DaimlerChrysler Collection, Berlin; Collection Billarant, Paris; and Lyon Collection, Melbourne.

Nixon’s work is managed by the Estate of John Nixon, Melbourne.

Reproduced from ‘John Nixon: Song of the Earth 1968-2020’ exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia, 2025. Ed. Sue Cramer.