AUSTRALIAN ART West Australian –
pp. 120 illusts First Edition Signed by Author. Limited Edition No #159/500
Andrew Nicholls is an Australian/British artist, writer, and curator whose practice engages with the sentimental, camp, and other historically-marginalised aesthetics, and traces the historical recurrence of particular aesthetic motifs. He is especially concerned with periods of cultural transition during which Western civilisation’s stoic aspirations were undone by base desires, fears or compulsions.
While primarily drawing-based, his practice also incorporates ceramics, photography and installation. He particularly draws inspiration from heritage sites and museum collections, and has coordinated and participated in residencies at locations including Spode China (at that time the UK’s longest-running ceramics factory still based in its original location), the Freud Museum London (family home of the founder of psychoanalysis), and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (George IV’s seaside pleasure palace). In 2015 he was allowed exclusive access to photograph Donatello’s David, by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. In 2017 he was the first Western Australian artist to undertake an ArtSource residency with Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, USA.
Nicholls has exhibited across Australia, Southeast Asia, Italy and the United Kingdom, including solo exhibitions across Australia, and in Plymouth, England. He has been the recipient of two Creative Development Fellowships from the Western Australian Government, and undertaken commissions for several organisations in Australia and the United States, including his $250,000 ceiling mural for the City of Perth Library.
Nicholls’ work is represented in collections including Artbank; the Art Gallery of Western Australia; the City of Perth; Central Institute of Technology; Curtin, Edith Cowan and Murdoch Universities; Janet Holmes a Court Collection; and the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings. His solo exhibition ‘Hyperkulturemia’ opened at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in late 2018.
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