A visionary artist and cultural icon, Sidney Nolan transformed the image of a nation and changed the course of Australian art with his depictions of the country’s landscapes and legends. Opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in October, the major exhibition Nolan: Origins, journeys through the artist’s formative years and the extraordinary body of work that established him as a defining figure in modern art.

Spanning the remarkable creative period from the late 1930s until Nolan’s departure for the United Kingdom in 1953, and bringing together more than 150 significant works from public and private collections, Nolan: Origins is the first major survey dedicated exclusively to the artist’s early years in Australia. The exhibition traces the intense output of a young artist who achieved artistic maturity with remarkable speed, exploring the locations and myths that inspired Nolan’s creative breakthroughs and shaped one of the most celebrated œuvres in Australian art.

Internationally acclaimed in his lifetime, Nolan (born Melbourne 1917; died London 1992) continues to inspire contemporary artists through his combination of imaginative power and formal innovation. With paintings that are bold in colour, striking in composition and forthright in technique, Nolan re-envisaged the landscape by exploring its histories and folklores, creating iconic works that include his now famous series on the 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly.

The exhibition examines Nolan’s engagement with the environments he painted as he developed his singular, enigmatic modernist language. From the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where Nolan spent his childhood, to the Wimmera region of Victoria, K’gari (also known as Fraser Island), outback New South Wales and Queensland, Central Australia and the legendary terrain of the bushranger Ned Kelly in Glenrowan and north-eastern Victoria, Nolan: Origins reveals the profound relationship Nolan forged between his artistic practice and the Australian landscapes that stimulated his imagination.

Among the exhibition highlights is Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, widely regarded as one of the defining achievements of Australian art. The complete 27-painting cycle will be presented in Sydney for the first time in more than 60 years, reuniting First-class marksman (1946) from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection with 26 works on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. Rarely experienced together as a complete series, Nolan’s most celebrated body of work is presented here as it was originally exhibited, revealing how he transformed a 19th-century bushranger into an enduring national legend.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Director Maud Page says: “Few artists have had a greater impact on the way Australians see themselves and the landscape than Sidney Nolan. By uniting these landmark works, including the complete Ned Kelly series for the first time in a generation in Sydney, Nolan: Origins brings anew the energy and ambition that propelled Nolan to national and international acclaim.”

Following Nolan’s creative journey chronologically through nine thematic sections, the exhibition explores how his encounters with specific landscapes, histories and stories informed the development of modern allegories of place. Together, the artworks illuminate the remarkable decade between Nolan’s exhibiting debut in 1939 and the creation of his celebrated Central Australia paintings before he departed Australia, offering fresh insight into the origins of one of modernism’s most inventive and distinct painters.

Exhibition curator and Art Gallery of New South Wales senior curator of Australian Art Denise Mimmocchi says: “Sidney Nolan is a pivotal figure in the history of Australian art, creating works that redefined perceptions of place and nation in our cultural imagination. It is a pleasure to look more closely at the crucial years of Nolan’s beginnings—arguably the most vital of his career—when he created works that remain central to the imaging of Australia as an expansive, imaginative place, and as a psychic and poetic space.”

Emerging from the explosively creative environs of Melbourne’s Heide in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nolan received critical support from art patrons John and Sunday Reed and was a member of the influential Angry Penguins circle. It was at Heide that he developed a distinctive modernist visual language that helped reshape Australian art. The exhibition begins with key works from this formative period, including Boy and the moon (c 1939–40) and Luna Park (1941).

The exhibition’s next chapter focuses on Nolan’s wartime posting to Victoria’s Wimmera region, which transformed him from an artist primarily engaged with modernist experimentation into one deeply responsive to the Australian landscape. Works such as Kiata (1943) and Railway guard, Dimboola (1943) capture his growing engagement with the vastness, atmosphere and underlying strangeness of regional Australia, marking a decisive shift in his practice.

Other highlights include Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda (1945), painted while Nolan was living under an alias identity after deserting the army. Connecting personally with the outlaw status of Australia’s most mythologised bushranger, this period also saw the beginnings of the celebrated Ned Kelly series, in which the bushranger became a powerful vehicle for exploring identity, alienation and rebellion within the Australian landscape.

Nolan’s travels through Queensland are chronicled in his Fraser Island series, which includes the story of shipwreck survivor Eliza Fraser. In seminal paintings such as Pretty Polly Mine 1948 and Agricultural Hotel (1948), the architecture and mining settlements of the outback are transformed into vivid, psychologically charged images of place.

A major journey across inland and northern Australia in 1949 inspired some of Nolan’s most ambitious landscape paintings. In works such as Central Australia (1950), he presented a bold new vision of the continent, while paintings such as Burke and Wills leaving Melbourne (1950) and Burke at Cooper’s Creek (1950) reconsidered the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition of 1860–61 as a broader meditation on failed ambition and the colonial encounter with the Australian interior.

The final series of Nolan’s ‘origin’ works in the exhibition, encompassing the carcass paintings and those depicting spiritual figures in the desert, offer divergent visions of the Australian environment. Drawing on Italian primitivist and Renaissance influences, paintings such as Temptation of St Anthony (1952) recast the outback as the setting for biblical dramas of temptation, redemption and salvation. In contrast, works such as Carcase (1953) confront the realities of drought and environmental destruction, themes that resonate with renewed urgency today. Although Nolan relocated permanently to the United Kingdom in 1953, the landscapes, histories and myths explored in these formative Australian works continued to fuel his imagination throughout his career.