John Nixon 1, January 1979, 1979 (printed 2012)

John Nixon (1949–2020), installation artist and painter, studied at the Preston Institute of Technology and the National Gallery School in the late 1960s and 1970. Becoming interested in multi-media art and art as language, he showed at the Pinocotheca Gallery between 1973 and 1977 and was represented in many important group shows from 1975 onward. Over time, he was to develop a minimalist, abstract aesthetic influenced by the utopian art and politics of Kasimir Malevich. At the beginning of the 1980s he and his then-wife, Jenny Watson, established Art Projects, an austere space reached by many flights of stairs in a rambling city building. A number of Nixon’s works from the early 1980s onwards came under the umbrella title of Self-portrait (non-objective composition) including abstracts using only the techniques, materials and compositional modes of the Constructivists. In 1990 he began the Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), and from 1995 produced a plethora of predominantly orange works; later he took to ‘furtive’ use of silver and to creating polychromatic abstracts. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, most state galleries and Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2012
© Estate of Robert Rooney