John Nixon

Artist Page

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting a solo exhibition of work by John Nixon, with focus on works made in the year 2001 from his extended project Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW). This is the first exhibition of the artist’s work with the gallery, in collaboration with the Estate of John Nixon.

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‘EPW: 2001’ offers a snapshot of John Nixon’s long-running Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW) project, three decades into his five-decade career. The year 2001 provides a temporal frame through which to view his output at this point, where broader themes meet the individuality of each specific painting.

Minimalist approaches to shape and colour engage with a poetics of materials through enamel paint on MDF and thick plywood, with occasional found objects including glass shards, coins and bottle tops dispersed across painted surfaces. The exhibition continues John’s engagement with EPW: Orange, begun in 1995, while marking a renewed concentration on EPW: Silver, where the brilliance of orange gives way to a cooler metallic sheen. This range includes pure monochrome and two-colour compositions, through to orange constructions incorporating up to five additional hues.

A great deal happened for John in 2001, including significant activity in Europe. A survey of EPW: Orange was staged at the Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland, and included several of the orange paintings displayed here. That same year, the Stiftung für konkrete Kunst (Foundation for Abstract Art) in Reutlingen, Germany, presented ‘Works: 1968–2001’, John’s first European retrospective, which incorporated some of these same paintings and occupied more than 1,000 square metres of the foundation’s industrial-scale building ¹.

In April, John also travelled to New York, where the glimmering expanse of silver-painted roofs seen through artist Peter Halley’s studio window reinvigorated his engagement with EPW: Silver, prompting the inscription ‘New York’ on several silver paintings made that year ². In August, we moved as a family from Sydney to Melbourne, where John undertook an artist residency at a farmhouse in Warrandyte. Many works from this period bear the ink-stamped insignia ‘Longridge Farm’ on the reverse. We also purchased a 1964 modernist house in nearby Briar Hill, where a purpose-built studio would soon provide a base for his art practice until his death in 2020.

It feels relevant to mention that John loved Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘, a film released in the socially and culturally turbulent year of 1968, the same year John made his first paintings. Drawn to Kubrick’s style of cosmic abstraction, he was particularly taken by the black obelisk in the film, recognising it as a minimalist form. Revealing a side of John not widely known and opening up wider resonances in his work, this fondly held pop-cultural touchstone might serve, tangentially or playfully, as a quiet talisman and emblem of the future—especially on the occasion of his inaugural exhibition at Fine Arts, Sydney.

Sue Cramer, Melbourne 2026

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For further information, please contact the gallery directly: email@finearts.sydney / +61 (0) 2 9361 6200