Arabic version: ستة أعمال لسيدني نولان تتتبع رؤيته الفنية المبكرة

According to ABC News, Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales features more than 150 works by Sidney Nolan, charting his career from 1939 until his move to London in 1953. Curated by Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at AGNSW, the Sydney exhibition examines places and stories that informed the modernist artist’s work.

Among the featured paintings is Kiata, made in 1943 while Nolan was stationed at Nhill during World War II, guarding Australia’s food reserves. Mimmocchi describes the western Victorian landscape as a breakthrough, when “the abstract artist also becomes a landscape painter”. The horse-drawn wagon’s form is seen as a precursor to the shape of Nolan’s later Ned Kelly helmet.

Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda, painted in 1945, revisits a blaze Nolan witnessed as a nine-year-old in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Mimmocchi says that while he was living in hiding, Nolan painted childhood memories with greater intensity. She describes the work’s figures and movement as vibrant but tense, connecting its anxiety to his wartime present.

The exhibition includes all 27 works from Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, begun in 1946 at Heide. The paintings drew on stories from Nolan’s grandfather, his own army desertion, archival research and a visit to Glenrowan. In Quilting the armour from 1947, Kelly’s sister Margaret stitches padding into his helmet; a red robin on a fencepost refers to Nolan’s alias while in hiding, Robin Murray.

Later works include Central Australia, painted in 1950 after Nolan travelled through central Australia, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley with his wife Cynthia and adopted daughter Jinx. His aerial views while accompanying aviator Eddie Connellan on mail deliveries informed the painting. Temptation of St Anthony from 1952 places a biblical story in an Australian desert, with a goanna, giant dragonfly and horned angel among its figures. Nolan: Origins is at AGNSW until February 7.