John NixonSong of the Earth

For over five decades, Australian artist John Nixon (1949–2020) produced abstract art driven by a spirit of experimentation and a deep engagement with radical modernism. An influential and collaborative figure both in Australia and internationally, Nixon is celebrated for the remarkable breadth of his practice. While abstract and non-objective painting remained his primary focus—explored under the banner of his Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW)—his expanded concept of art extended across multiple disciplines, including experimental music, photography, theatre, film, and printmaking.

Song of the Earth is the first major survey to trace Nixon’s career from his beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s as a minimal and conceptual artist, through to his striking 1980s installations combining paintings with readymade objects, and into the final decades of his life, marked by continued experimentation and the expansion of his painting practice. With a profound personal belief in the intertwining of art and life, Nixon often incorporates found objects and materials into his paintings and installations. This fusion lends his work both intellectual rigour and poetic resonance, the everyday objects at once ordinary and elevated. ‘My art is not only an analysis of form (the conceptual edge of painting and sculpture) … but a metaphor for life’, Nixon said in 1993.