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John Neylon reviews 'Other Side Art: Trevor Nickolls, a survey of paintings and drawings 1972 - 2007' in The Adelaide Review
Other side art: Trevor Nickolls
A survey of paintings and drawings
1972 – 2007
Samstag Museum
October 22 – December 17
By John Neylon
Oddly enough, for an artist responsible for one of Adelaide’s largest and most public art works, Trevor Nickolls has largely remained an absent presence in the line-up of significant South Australian contemporary artists. His only Adelaide solo show (prior to this survey) was presented at the Robert Steele Gallery in 1990. His 6 x 30 metre mural with its floating Mimi-like figure was painted onto one of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Amphitheatre walls in 1992.
Nickolls was born in Adelaide (Port Adelaide) in 1949 and studied at the South Australian School of Art (1967 – 1970) before relocating, and working or studying variously in Canberra, Melbourne and Darwin, in addition to travel within and outside of Australia. His participation as Australian representative (along with Kimberley artist Rover Thomas) in the 1990 Venice Biennale confirmed his emerging national reputation as an Indigenous Australian artist with a distinctive voice and style of expression.
To give credit, the Art Gallery of South Australia did exercise a keen eye ahead of this recognition and acquired three works by the artist in the late 1980s. Among this group is the early (1972) Australian worker’s portrait which is a forerunner of what would become broadly recognised as Nickolls’s narrative style; a dominant figure surrounded by smaller action vignettes. This work is included in Other side art and deserves close study as an insight into the artist’s transition into a mature and distinctive talent. The earnest modelling is evidence of a struggle to find the best way to articulate both large and small details. But the cheeky humour of what appears to be Adam and Eve hanging out the washing on a Hills Hoist and the cool, Beckmann-like stare of the central portrait declare an imagination already well versed in traditions of European visual satire.
In this regard exhibition curator Michael O’Ferrall provides some interesting insights. He comments that Nickolls, growing up in the pre-television 1950s was drawn to comic book graphics. Other influences he cites are adult and children’s radio serials and dramas. O’Ferrall also mentions the various influences of the compositional systems of the Cubists and the satire of Hogarth and Doré (and later Philip Guston). Another work acquired by the Art Gallery in the same year (1988) is Machine Time Madonna. The split-head central motif finds echoes in a number of works in Other side art. Make no mistake; this is the artist’s signature motif, one that takes the viewer to the heartland of the artist’s imagination and world view. A screaming Munch-like mask co-joined to a Dreaming-dotted contemplative face set against a binary backdrop of a $ dominated city skyline and a night sky wonderland is a powerful formula which has served the artist well.
This absorbing exhibition of more than 50 works is the first museum survey of Nickolls’s work to be presented. The context of the artist’s development is grounded in the politics of a 1960s – 1970s era in which Indigenous issues drove the emergence of a coherent Aboriginal art movement. That Nickolls was articulating many of these issues, particularly related to self and cultural identity, in advance of the debates and the mainstreaming of Aboriginal art (post Namatjira and Yirrawala) has been widely recognised and also appropriately summarised by Brenda L. Croft’s epithet that Nickolls is “the father of urban Aboriginal art”. Clearly themed, Other side art is a rare opportunity to assess Nickolls’s evolution as an artist and its capacity to engage through the hybridity, at times riskiness, and the inventiveness of its imagery.
To read the article in full, please visit The Adelaide Review website.
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