John Nixon - Experimental Painting Workshop

Exhibition held at Castlemaine Art Museum, 19 March – 25 June 2017

This exhibition presents a recent selection from Nixon’s Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), a project that began in London in 1978 and continues to this day. Rejecting narrative, realism and pictorialism which he sees as limitations on painting, Nixon’s EPW proposes an expanded, and expanding, definition via the principles of modernist non-objectivity, specifically, the monochrome, Minimalism and Constructivism, and dynamic approaches to their exhibition. In his employment of the ready-made object, made famous by Marcel Duchamp in the early 20th century, Nixon demonstrates an intuitive method of collecting, rationalising and repurposing the everyday into otherwise abstract works. The en masse presentation of this exhibition is a hallmark of the EPW, offering both a spectacular experience of the whole, while also giving emphasis to individual works as evidence of the progression of Nixon’s thesis on the open-ended possibilities for painting.

2017, English
Softcover, 105 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Castlemaine
Author: Emma Cox