Messums London is pleased to present a curated selection of works by Sidney Nolan alongside those of his daughter, Jinx Nolan. Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) was a leading Australian artist whose bold, experimental practice helped shape a distinct visual language—and, in time, an Australian national identity. Raised in Melbourne’s seaside suburb of St Kilda, Nolan drew early inspiration from swimming baths, piers, Luna Park, and the recurring figure of the bather. These motifs were shaped by leisure and Australia’s enduring fascination with the coast. That fascination persists: according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as of 2023, 87% of Australians lived within 50 kilometres of the coastline. The pull of the shore can, at times, eclipse the realities of the interior.
As Nolan’s work moved inland, these figures were displaced into harsher, drought-stricken environments, where the ease of the shoreline gave way to the isolation of the outback. In 1948, Nolan travelled from Adelaide to central Australia. Here he reframed the body, and the playful register of his St Kilda works, turning instead to stark subjects—most notably dead horses—set within an unforgiving interior landscape. Here, his imagery becomes more direct, and more attuned to the territorial anxieties that shape Australia beyond the coast.
Accompanying Nolan on this journey to the outback was his daughter—later an artist in her own right—Jinx Nolan (b. 1941). Jinx developed a close relationship with Sidney, encouraging him to read the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and sustaining a dialogue that would continue into her own practice. Nearly every exhibition or trip Sidney undertook was marked by a pictorial correspondence with Jinx, culminating in more than 50 postcards— each pairing an image on the front with a note on the back.
This exhibition traces how Jinx and Sidney’s exchanges filtered into Nolan’s early work, and how his travels to Japan and Greece opened a small aperture onto the concerns that later surface—more starkly—in his Drought series.
