Find Lots

• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  76
• Lot Description:
  Trevor Nickolls
  (1949-2012)
  Self Portrait with Alice and the Tin (2010)
  synthetic polymer paint on canvas
  bears Australian & International Arts TN 2010-03 verso
  91.5 x 91 cm
• Provenance:
  Australian & International Arts, Adelaide; Private Collection, South Australia; This painting is sold with Australian & International Arts documentation.
• Exhibited:
  Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 13 August - 19 December 2011
• Notes:
  Trevor Nickolls was one of the pioneers of what has become known as the Indigenous urban art movement. He was the first Aboriginal artist, along with Rover Thomas (c.1926-1998), to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Based in Adelaide, Nickolls graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1972, majoring in painting, and gained a post-graduate diploma from the Victorian College of Art in 1980. In 1981 he was the Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. From Dreamtime to Machinetime, at the Canberra Theatre Centre Gallery in 1978 was Nickolls' first solo exhibition. It coalesced ideas in painting that were to become the recurring theme of Nickolls' oeuvre, the alienation, discrimination and displacement felt by Aboriginal people living within a society where they are in the minority, and the search for identity. In 1984 Nickolls was represented in the ground breaking exhibition Koori Art '84 at Artspace in Sydney which drew attention to Indigenous artists working within Australia's big cities-artists who until then were largely ignored by the mainstream art world. The exhibition was the catalyst to the establishment of the first urban-based Aboriginal art centre, Boomalli, in Sydney in 1987. Nickolls went on to participate in several seminal exhibitions including a number that have had a profound effect on the acceptance of Indigenous Australian art abroad. These included Australia: Art and Aboriginality in England in 1987; Tagari Lia: My Family - Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Australia that toured the United Kingdom in 1990; L'ŽtŽ Australien ˆ Montpellier organized by the National Gallery of Australia, in Montpellier, France; Crossroads-Towards a New Reality, Aboriginal Art from Australia at the National Museums of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo; and Aratjara: Art of the First Australians that toured Europe in 1993-94. In 2009 the Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, organised a major travelling retrospective exhibition, curated by Michael O'Ferrall, Other side art: Trevor Nickolls, a survey of paintings and drawings 1972Ñ2007. Nickolls' drew inspiration from a wide range of sources: he was heavily influenced by artists throughout the history of European art, from Giotto to Durer, from van Gogh to Picasso and the Surrealists; whereas he worked closely with two master Aboriginal painters in different traditions-Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa (born 1944) the desert painter from Papunya, and the bark painter John Bulunbulun (1946-2010). Nickolls succeeded in evolving a style of painting which amalgamates his Western European art education with traditional concepts of visual expression to create a new visual language; one that does not rely on relaying traditional Aboriginal designs and patterns, and one that challenges Margaret Preston's historical vision of a Ônational style' of Australian painting and design whereby non-Indigenous artists could claim traditional Indigenous motifs. Preston is also the subject of a number of Nickolls' paintings. Self portrait with Alice and the Tin Man was inspired by a visit to Alice Springs. It incorporates many of the motifs that reappear in Nickolls' work; the Ôstage set' landscape, brick walls, windows, ladders, the cage, a bird, the serpent, anthropomorphized trees. The painting also combines two of major recurring fudnamental themes of Nickolls' art, the whimsical with the intensely personal search for identity and the self. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$14,000 - 18,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

  Can't see the realised price? Upgrade your subscription now!

• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.