The artist John Nixon was a great sharer. Whether it was an unexpected gift from the tote bag he always seemed to have on his shoulder, the opportunity to collaborate in a new creative venture or the enthusiastic endorsement of an artist’s latest work, Nixon was a man known for his generosity, rigorous intellect and good humour.
Nixon, who died on 18 August aged 70, had been diagnosed with leukaemia last year. His final exhibition, Groups + Pairs 2016-2020, opened at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne on 21 March.
It was the day that social distancing rules were imposed throughout Australia to curb the spread of Covid-19.
Social distance was the antithesis of Nixon’s approach; one of the common themes in the recent outpouring of tributes on social media was his passion for connecting with people. His support for artists spanned genres and age groups and he was indefatigable in attending art shows, boundary-pushing musical happenings and other creative events.
Described by Schwartz, a long time friend, as “interested, curious, fresh and non-dogmatic”, she says that he was an artist of prodigious output with an impressive tally of exhibitions in Australia and internationally, spanning more than 45 years.
She says Nixon was a huge influence on the gallery from its earliest days, focussing the space as an international meeting place for contemporary conceptual artists.
He was also, she says, a curator of perspicacity.
“One of his huge talents was for installation,” she said. “The exhibition was always a work in itself.” The current show, comprises 116 works of geometric abstraction, will continue until the end of the year, in his memory.
Max Delany, director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) described him as “establishing a model of how to be an artist, both through practice and example. He backed this up by being an inspiring collaborator and mentor to generations of artists, writers and publishers”.
His curating, small-press publishing and his experimental musical performances were integral to his expansive practice, which included installation, collage, photography and video.
Nixon, who trained at Preston Institute of Technology and the National Gallery of Art School, Melbourne, had as strong a reputation overseas as he did at home. He represented Australia at one of the contemporary art world’s most influential international exhibitions, Documenta 7, in Kassel, Germany, in 1982, and exhibited widely throughout Europe and the US.
In 1999 he was the winner of the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Melbourne, and in 2001/02 received an Australia Council Fellowship Award. He was also immensely prolific, with more than 70 solo shows since 2001.
Nixon had his first solo exhibition at Melbourne’s avant-garde gallery, Pinacotheca, in 1973. It was in Melbourne, a few years later that he founded the influential artist-run space Art Projects, where he could show his own works and also the work of contemporaries, including his then wife and the gallery’s co-founder Jenny Watson, as well as Imants Tillers, Tony Clark, Mike Parr and Peter Tyndall.
Art Projects was, says Delany, pioneering in its vision, and a template for the artist-run galleries that followed.
As director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1980-81, Nixon was a beacon of avant-garde sensibilities and practice in a city stultified by the long-running premiership of arch-conservative Joh Bjelke Petersen.
Robert Forster, founder of the Brisbane indie rock group The Go-Betweens commented in a tribute in Art Forum that Nixon was the first full-time practising artist he had ever met, and cut a dash as a “dark-clothed charismatic figure, hair swept back behind one ear, a fringe of black ringlets cascading over the other side of his face, gazing intently toward the stage”.
Nixon’s explorations and experimentations in radical modernism, minimalism, constructivism and the monochrome were already well-established by then.
In 1990 he devised an umbrella term, the Experimental Painting Workshop – EPW – to encompass what he described as a “position of critical action – a manifesto for practice”.
This manifesto centred on the materiality of making. “Painting should be engaged in the elimination of the non-essential,” he wrote. “One is dealing with the specific qualities which constitute painting; colour, texture, brushstrokes, size, thickness of stretcher, shape, design [and] abstract/formal problem solving.”
His assemblages were another important part of his practice, made from scavenged materials using the mass-produced, the ready-made and the quotidian.
He once joked with a friend that he had a problem with his tax returns as he didn’t spend enough on art materials.
Nixon held a steady course over the decades, exploring the same ideas again and again. Although some critics saw his output as doctrinaire and austere, it was anything but, says Delany: “His work was joyous and playful resonant and poetic and he was a great aesthete … [It] was about honesty and truth to materials. With John, simplicity was a virtue.”
John Nixon is survived by his partner, the curator Sue Cramer, and a daughter, Emma Nixon.
• Groups + Pairs (2016-2020) will remain open at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne until the end of the year
