John Nixon

b. 1949 Sydney, Australia / d. 2020 Melbourne, Australia

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Biography
John Nixon (b. 1949, Sydney, Australia; d. Melbourne, Australia, 2020) is one of the most renowned abstract artists of his generation. Since his first solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1973, he has mounted hundreds of solo exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. In 1982, he was selected by Germano Celant to represent Australia at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany.

Nixon’s work is included in public and private collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Australian National Gallery (Canberra), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), TarraWarra Museum of Art (Melbourne), Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane), Auckland Art Gallery (Auckland, New Zealand), National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Museum Sztuki (Lodz, Poland), Foire National d’Art Contemporain (Paris, France), Herning Kunstmuseumm (Denmark), Kunstmuseum Esberg (Denmark), Stiftung fur Konkrete Kunst (Reutlingen, Germany), Daimler Collection (Berlin, Germany), and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (Switzerland), among many others.

Nixon is the recipient of the Australian Council Fellowship Award (2001) and the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award (1999). During the late 1960s, he studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School and Preston Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Overview
Artist John Nixon began his ongoing project – Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW) – in 1990 to encompass his expansive investigation into the history and legacy of abstraction in Europe, the United States, and Australasia. Working project by project, Nixon organizes his cumulative visual research into specific, yet open-ended groupings to which he assigns titles such as EPW: OrangeEPW: Polychrome, and EPW: Silver, among others.