Three Figures (detail), 2022, oil on linen.
"In this exhibition, he presents two groupings of paintings made 20 years apart. The first six works, dated between 1998 and 2001, were painted directly from the screen of one of the early commercially available laptop computers – a 1997 Apple PowerBook 1400cs. The second group uses mannequins and figurative shapes from the history of art. These paintings were completed between 2021 and 2022, after Nichols returned to Australia following several years living in Singapore and Malaysia.
By staging this marked temporal gap of 20 years between the two groupings, Nichols invites us to focus on how paintings extend beyond the specific contexts of individual works. He is interested in a painting’s painterly character and its passage in time. It is the aspects of painting that leap across the gaps between individual works that Nichols suggests are internal to painting and key to how it operates."
