John Nixon, the renowned Australian avant-garde artist who passed away in 2020, was known for his unconventional artistic practices that blurred the lines between everyday life and high art. The late artist would sometimes save eggshells from his breakfast and sprinkle them across wet paint to create his own version of a starry night. In another notable period of his career, he imposed strict creative rules on himself, such as painting exclusively in orange for five years starting in 1996.
The orange period began when Nixon was becoming a father and wanted to streamline his artistic practice. He reasoned that no other artist was particularly associated with the color orange, making it uniquely his own territory. These anecdotes reflect Nixon's lifelong commitment to frugality, his personal idiosyncrasies, and his strategic approach to art-making, as well as his unwavering dedication to integrating art into everyday life over more than five decades.
According to Sue Cramer, Nixon's wife and co-curator of his first major posthumous exhibition, the artist's hardline minimalism never felt restrictive or overly complicated. Instead, it maintained a balance of rigor and playfulness, combining critical thinking with spontaneous discoveries. "Through his life and work he wanted to challenge orthodoxy in everything he did," Cramer explains.
The exhibition, titled "Song of the Earth 1968-2020," is currently on display at the Heide Museum of Modern Art and represents both a professional and deeply personal undertaking for Cramer. She has spent considerable time sorting through Nixon's vast collection of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of artworks spanning multiple mediums including painting, prints, text, music, film, performance, and photography. Nixon himself once jokingly told fellow artist Marco Fusinato, "I made too much."
Despite Nixon's reputation as a staunch minimalist known for his imposing cross paintings and straightforward monochrome works, the exhibition title emphasizes both his gentleness and his artistic rigor. For an artist who cultivated a rather serious reputation in his youth during the 1970s, "Song of the Earth" highlights Nixon's love of nature and music, which Cramer says runs throughout his work as "a joyous celebration of art and living as an artist."
The exhibition opens with a kaleidoscopic yet orderly room dedicated to Nixon's Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), which he started in the 1970s. EPW became an enduring framework for his abstract paintings, drawing inspiration from conceptualism, minimalism, and Russian constructivism – all methods of questioning the fundamental nature of art itself.
Visitors can explore playful lines of color and form throughout the exhibition, including the famous orange paintings from the 1990s that incorporated unconventional materials such as sawdust and onion bags. Although the strict color rule didn't last permanently, these works demonstrate Nixon's commitment to material experimentation. The show also features his shimmering silver series, rare curvy paintings with organic and planetary qualities, and his iconic crosses and monochromes from various decades, some of which have everyday objects like dinner plates or violins attached to their surfaces.
Nixon's use of found objects and inexpensive materials initially arose from financial necessity, but he maintained this frugal approach throughout his career. Working on surfaces ranging from cardboard to masonite, he developed what Cramer describes as "his sense of making something out of nothing." She explains, "You don't go to the art store, you find something in the leftovers."
When asked whether Nixon understood from the beginning that he was embarking on a lifelong project of variations in color and form, and that the sheer volume of his work would become its own artistic statement, Cramer responds without hesitation: "Yes, I think he did." This awareness suggests that Nixon's prolific output was itself a conceptual element of his artistic practice.
The exhibition includes Nixon's significant 1982 installation from Documenta 7, the influential international art exhibition. This multipart work featured cloth banners, typewritten texts, and paintings on newspaper, all designed to pack neatly into a suitcase to avoid expensive freight fees – another example of his practical approach to art-making.
In a particularly poignant curatorial decision, Nixon's first and last artworks are positioned about 40 meters apart, facing each other across the gallery space. His final works, created in 2020 when he knew he was dying, consist of two pieces featuring squares within squares that seem almost like metaphors for eyes, suggesting a final contemplation of perception and vision.
Nixon's artistic journey began with a small black monochrome painted in 1968 when he was just 19 years old and studying at Preston Institute of Technology. This early work was influenced by a recent display of Ad Reinhardt's black monochromes at the National Gallery of Victoria and a Marcel Duchamp exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.
Cramer explains that Nixon was "sensing there was a different art you could make that wasn't hand-to-eye technique." During the 1960s and 1970s, Australian conceptual artists were actively questioning established ideals of realism and expressionism. Nixon played a crucial role in forming independent art spaces and building an impressive community of like-minded artists including Jenny Watson, Peter Tyndall, Tony Clarke, and Imants Tillers.
Throughout his career, Nixon engaged sincerely – never ironically – with modernist art histories, writing manifestos outlining his vision for experimental art in Australia. His work consistently demonstrated a commitment to serious artistic inquiry while maintaining an accessible, unpretentious approach.
A persistent theme throughout the exhibition is labor and the process of making. Hessian potato bags and pumpkin seeds cover canvases, artworks hang from an old agricultural wheelbarrow, and paintings incorporate tools like hammers and saws. "He was interested in the idea of construction, the worker and building," Cramer notes. "He saw what he did as an artist as work."
This focus on labor connects to Nixon's lasting influence from Russian Constructivism, an early 20th-century art movement that emphasized abstract forms and industrial materials for social purposes. When considering what motivated a young man in 1970s Melbourne to operate like a Russian avant-garde artist, seemingly out of time and place, Cramer offers insight into his artistic philosophy.
"He found a precedent for the reinvention of what art could be," she explains. "That meant that he, in his own time where art was being reinvented, could borrow from that precedent and take it into the future. He also responded to the poetry of it, to its ambition, to the idea that art should integrate with life."
"John Nixon: Song of the Earth" continues at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne until March 9, 2026, offering visitors an comprehensive look at one of Australia's most innovative and influential contemporary artists.
