Charles Nodrum Gallery present John Vickery
Sydney Contemporary 2023, Booth G07
Carriageworks
7 to 10 September
Born in Bunyip, near Melbourne, in 1906, John Vickery completed his studies at the National Gallery School in the early 1930s and earned a living as a commercial artist, producing posters and wall paintings and working on architectural projects.
A growing interest in Cubism and Vorticism led him overseas, and after being a war artist in the US Army for six years, he settled in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1940s, where he met leading avant-garde artists of the day, such as Pollock, de Kooning, and Guston. In the 1950s, his work shifted away from textured abstraction towards the rhythms of op art, and his 1960s and 70s works exemplify the power of the genre through the process of perception and its insistence on abstraction fusing art and science.
Poet and critic Gary Catalano wrote in The Age of the artist’s 1988 exhibition Split Spectrum and Linear Paintings at Charles Nodrum Gallery: “Cool. Clinical and disciplined, [Vickery’s works] place before us the simplest visual phenomena, yet phrase these phenomena in such a way that the mind immediately begins to question the information it has received . . .”
John Vickery (1906–1983), Untitled, c.1970, acrylic on board, 101.5 × 126.5cm. Courtesy Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
At Sydney Contemporary 2023, Charles Nodrum Gallery will celebrate a selection of the geometric abstract artists represented by the gallery. Geometric abstraction has remained one of Charles Nodrum’s main areas of personal interest and commercial focus throughout his fifty years in the art business, proving a strong statement to the gallery’s dedication to championing the genre and its sophistication in Australia – historically and currently.
