JOHN NIXON

Song of the Earth 1968–2020 Heide Museum of Modern Art 26 November 2025–9 March 2026 Melbourne

Press Release

For over five decades, Australian artist John Nixon (1949–2020) produced abstract art driven by a spirit of experimentation and a deep engagement with radical modernism. An influential and collaborative figure both in Australia and internationally, Nixon is celebrated for the remarkable breadth of his practice. While abstract and non-objective painting remained his primary focus—explored under the banner of his Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW)—his expanded concept of art extended across multiple disciplines, including experimental music, photography, theatre, film, and printmaking.

Song of the Earth 1968–2020 is the first major survey to trace Nixon’s career from his beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s as a minimal and conceptual artist, through to his striking 1980s installations combining paintings with readymade objects, and into the final decades of his life, marked by continued experimentation and the expansion of his painting practice. With a profound personal belief in the intertwining of art and life, Nixon often incorporates found objects and materials into his paintings and installations. This fusion lends his work both intellectual rigour and poetic resonance, the everyday objects at once ordinary and elevated. ‘My art is not only an analysis of form (the conceptual edge of painting and sculpture) ... but a metaphor for life’,__Nixon said in 1993.

About the Artist

Sydney-born contemporary artist John Nixon was a leading figure of Australian abstraction and experimental art. Spanning more than half a century from the late 1960s, his career was defined by formal experiments and innovation that encompassed painting to collage, photography, video, dance and experimental music performance.

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About the Gallery

Heide Museum of Modern Art, commonly known as Heide, is a public art museum in Bulleen, on the banks of the Birrarung/Yarra River around nine kilometres north-east of central Melbourne, Australia. Established as a museum in 1981, Heide occupies the former home and property of arts patrons John and Sunday Reed, who bought the then-dairy farm in 1934 and transformed it into a hub for Australian modernism. Set within 16 acres of heritage-listed gardens and sculpture park, the museum now presents modern and contemporary art across three main buildings and is recognised as one of Australia’s most important cultural sites. Heide’s intertwined histories of art, architecture, landscape, and progressive social experiment give it a distinctive place within Melbourne’s cultural ecology.

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Address

7 Templestowe Road
Bulleen
Melbourne
Australia

Opening Hours

Tuesday - Sunday: 10am - 5pm

Heide Museum of Modern Art

7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Melbourne, Australia

+61 3 9850 1500
http://www.heide.com.au

Opening hours

Tuesday - Sunday: 10am - 5pm

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