- We checked out Sydney’s major new Sidney Nolan exhibition.
- See all 27 of Nolan’s iconic Ned Kelly paintings together at the Art Gallery of NSW.
- Here’s what we thought of Nolan: Origins.
At just 20 years old, Sidney Nolan tried to stow away on a boat bound for Europe, intending to move to Paris.
Thank god he was caught and sent back to shore; otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be standing in this room today, surrounded by some of the most incredible depictions of the Australian landscape ever painted.
The Art Gallery of NSW opens its first major exhibition dedicated to Nolan’s formative artistic years in Australia tomorrow. Titled Nolan: Origins, the exhibition brings together more than 150 works the artist created before he left for Europe in 1953.
Included in this layered exhibition are all 27 paintings from Nolan’s famous Ned Kelly series – the complete set reunited for the first time in almost 30 years.
Maud Page, the Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, tells us, “There are very few Australian artists whose work feels so deeply woven into our cultural imagination as Sidney Nolan, whose images have become part of how we see Australia and how we tell our stories.”
If you’re looking to experience some of Australia’s most iconic artworks, paintings that helped shape the trajectory of modernism in this country, few exhibitions offer the opportunity quite like this one.
See the famous Ned Kelly series
The reunification of Nolan’s Ned Kelly series is pretty spectacular, especially considering that 26 out of the 27 paintings live at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
The Art Gallery of NSW do own one Ned Kelly painting, the iconic First-Class Marksman, which they purchased for a record-breaking $5.4 million in 2010. But the rest were packed up and brought over, now displayed in Sydney as they were originally exhibited, not in chronological order but in the order that Nolan himself preferred.
Displayed in a dark room, Nolan’s simplified armour of the notorious bushranger takes centre stage. There’s Ned Kelly (1946), one of the defining images of the series, with Kelly riding a horse across a stark outback plain.
Death of Constable Scanlon (1946) is opposite, showing the violent clash at Stringybark Creek, where a police officer is killed and can be seen flying off his horse.
Make sure to check out the gallery’s senior curator of Australian art, Denise Mimmocchi’s, favourite piece in the whole exhibition. She tells us that she loves Quilting the Armour (1946), which depicts Kelly’s sister sewing padding into his armour. It juxtaposes the imagery of guns and violence we see in the other paintings with quite a tender moment.
Mimmocchi spoke to us about the cultural significance of Kelly’s armour, and why it’s persevered as a legendary Australian symbol, even getting its own reference in the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.
“I think there’s something about the pure invention of it,” she says. She tells us that Nolan used to go to see Kelly’s armour on display at the Melbourne Aquarium as a child, an early encounter that sparked his fascination with the infamous outlaw.
“You can see the appeal of the armour to an abstract artist, because it’s just this basic series of abstract shapes.”
Nolan’s works through a “lens of 2026”
As you wander through Nolan: Origins, you’ll see a great variety of his early works, from his depictions of Victoria’s Wimmera region and Melbourne’s Luna Park to his Fraser Island shipwreck series.
Page states, “These paintings, as you’ll see, are astonishingly fresh. They are bold, mysterious, humorous and surprisingly contemporary. Seeing them together reminds us why they’re occupying such a special place in Australian art.”
She continues to praise the curators, who she says have done an incredible job of bringing “a lens of 2026” to Nolan’s work. Nowhere is this more evident than in the exhibition’s final room, where a series of carcass paintings confront the realities of drought, environmental degradation and a landscape under pressure.
With the climate crisis of today hanging over us, it’s interesting to see Nolan’s strikingly relevant depictions of environmental chaos.
Mimmocchi also says that in our “time of crisis, national crisis, global crisis and environmental crisis” we should be “looking at paintings of the past with a sense of the present.”
Although she acknowledges that Nolan’s carcass paintings are a fairly “dark” note to end the exhibition on, she believes it’s fitting to leave visitors with something that prompts them to reflect on, that remains relevant to us today.
Nolan: Origins opens in the Art Gallery of NSW’s Nuula Nura building on October 3 and will run until February 7, 2027. Tickets cost $35 for adults, $10 for youths (ages 12-17) and are free for children under 12.
You can find out more about the exhibition here.
