TREVOR NICKOLLS, Untitled (Landscape), 1990

TREVOR NICKOLLS Ngarrindjeri language, 1949 - 2012 Untitled (Landscape), 1990 acrylic on canvas 75 x 49 cm; 80 x 54 cm (framed) signed front lower right: 'Trevor Nickolls 90' PROVENANCE Queensland College of Art, Queensland Private Collection, Queensland Coo-ee Art Marketplace, Aboriginal Works of Art, Sydney, 3 December 2019, Lot 50 Private Collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Gondola Dreaming, 1990, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, Queensland In this late work, Trevor Nickolls moves away from the dense patterning, vivid colour and layered imagery that characterised much of his earlier practice. Instead, the landscape is pared back to its essential elements: earth, horizon, sky and an overwhelming sense of space. Almost abstract in its simplicity, the painting represents a return to the fundamental experience of Country that had profoundly affected Nickolls during his years in the Northern Territory. Nickolls moved to Darwin in 1983 to take up a position as a specialist art teacher, and the experience marked an important shift in his work. "The light in Darwin was stunning - you feel that timelessness, that space," he later recalled.* The vast landscapes of the north offered a very different visual and emotional experience from the compressed urban environments that had occupied his earlier paintings. In this later period, Nickolls increasingly returned to that sense of openness. The intricate dots and parallel lines that had once filled his compositions remain, but here they are quieter and more restrained, set against broad areas of open ground. Space itself becomes central to the work. Nickolls reduces the landscape to something more meditative and enduring, returning to the light, distance and timelessness he had first encountered in the Northern Territory decades earlier. *Trevor Nickolls, quoted in Ulli Beier, Dream Time – Machine Time, p. 19. © TREVOR NICKOLLS / Copyright Agency, 2026

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