Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly Series

23 February - 19 May 2002 in the Entire Gallery

City Gallery Wellington's major contribution to the New Zealand Festival of the Arts of 2002 is Sir Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series - the most remarkable and original paintings in the history of Australian art by Australia's most famous artist. Secured for exhibition by the Prime Minister and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark, the Ned Kelly paintings rarely leave the National Gallery of Australia where they are on permanent display. 

Since they were gifted to the National Gallery in 1977, the series has left Australia only twice: they were exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1988, and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1994. At both institutions the works attracted large crowds. City Gallery Wellington is the sole venue for the exhibition of these iconic masterpieces in New Zealand.

Sir Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series retells what has become one of the defining episodes in Australian nationalism - the violent and climactic events leading up to Ned Kelly's capture and trial in 1880. The sequence of 27 paintings begins with the helmeted Kelly figure astride a horse, then we follow the outlaw through a number of scenarios which include skirmishes with police, some cross-dressing to escape detection alongside some scenes of the police at camp and on the trail.

The series concludes with the showdown at Glenrowan, in which Kelly is surrounded and finally subdued, and a scene from the subsequent trial. At once historical and mythological, Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings draw the viewer into one of the defining narratives not only of Australian history but of colonial experience throughout the world. The series is characterised by an extraordinary pictorial economy and intensity, enabling the works to convey the pathos, tragedy and humour of the Kelly saga.

The series is operatic in their heightened drama and emotion, yet it is delivered in a faux naif style inspired by both children's art and Modernist painting of the early 20th Century. At a time when many younger artists were veering towards abstraction, Nolan remained committed to the figurative potential of painting. In the character of Ned Kelly and the other historical figures he later painted (including the explorers Burke and Wills and the soldiers of Gallipoli) he found a way of expressing humanity in all its guises. By depicting people in extreme situations he highlighted states of being experienced by all people: dispossession, loss, alienation, not to mention courage, tenacity and idealism.

Sir Sidney Nolan was in his late twenties when he painted the series. Having been stationed in rural Victoria during the Second World War, he was familiar with the Australian interior with its expansive planes, skeletal trees and blinding sunlight. By the 1960s his reputation had spread well beyond Australia. In the UK, his art was championed by Sir Kenneth Clark and was exhibited widely. Today he is arguably the most significant Australian painter of the 20th century. Nolan returned to the subject of Ned Kelly throughout his career, painting the bush-ranger in further historical and imaginary situations, but these later works never matched the intensity of the 1946-47 series.

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