Art Gallery of New South Wales Tickets: Nolan Origins Exhibition

Your ticket gives you self-guided, unhurried access to the most in-depth survey of Nolan's formative Australian years at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in nearly 20 years, with no set time limit on your visit.

Getting started

The exhibition is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Art Gallery Road in the Domain, Sydney. Head into the Naala Nura building and take the escalator or elevator down to Lower Level 2. Present your ticket — printed or on your phone — at the exhibition entrance for validation.

What to expect

Sidney Nolan is the artist credited with redefining how Australia saw itself, best known for the Ned Kelly series and his epic portrayals of the outback and the national psyche.

• Around 100 major works span the full arc of his years in Australia before he relocated to the United Kingdom in 1953, the period widely regarded as the most inventive of his career.

• The Ned Kelly series (1946-47), painted in enamel on composition board, sits at the heart of the show: radically simplified paintings that turned a 19th-century outlaw into an armoured silhouette and made Nolan one of the most recognised names in Australian modernism.

• The exhibition traces his engagement with five Australian landscapes: the suburban beachside of St Kilda, the flat Wimmera plains, K'gari, the red earth of Central Australia, and the north-eastern Victorian bush country where Kelly's story unfolded.

• His engagement with place was never passive: mythological figures, creatures, and personal inner meanings reveal an artist interrogating what it meant to belong to, and paint, a country in the act of building its own identity.

• Several works are on loan from public and private collections and are protected under the Cultural Objects on Loan Act 2013, making this one of the most significant assemblies of his early work ever mounted in Australia.