Every second Wednesday, Director Paul Greenaway OAM will highlight one work from a GAGPROJECTS represented artist, and another secondary market work of particular interest, available through GAG ART ADVISORY.
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Matthew Thorne,
A Holden sedan burns on Lake Torrens salt at (Andamooka, South Australia 2019), 2019
Series: The Sand That Ate The Sea
C-Type print
100 x 101.5cm
$7,000 (Edition of 10+3 AP)
My father drove a white V6 Holden Commodore Berlina his entire life. The car seemed to me to become a part of him. Those memories of our childhood together in that car are welded to my mind. As are the memories of the salt flats of Lake Eyre from a childhood visit to Marree. I made this image in the years after my father died. His death made me confront mortality and loss. I remember he asked us for a Viking burial —to be burnt on a funeral pyre. Instead we had a traditional service in a church before he was laid to rest in a cemetery in Adelaide. I do not know what the land of Lake Eyre signifies in Aboriginal histories, but I know what I felt as the sun set out there. As the sky dipped into bright-flashed green, I felt our world to be very thin. It felt a place where one world and another met. The image of the burning car out across the salt flats came to me in a dream, as my father sometimes does.
Ian Abdulla
Birth of my Son, 1993
acrylic on canvas
90 x 102cm
$9,000
Ian Abdulla (1947–2011) was a Ngarrindjeri artist from South Australia, known for his vibrant, narrative paintings depicting life along the Murray River. Drawing from personal experiences, he documented Indigenous culture, community, and rural life with bold colors and handwritten text. His work, often described as visual storytelling, provides a unique perspective on contemporary Aboriginal history. Abdulla’s paintings are held in major Australian collections, including the National Gallery of Australia. His art preserves memories of a changing landscape and culture, making him a significant figure in Australian Indigenous art. Ian was one of the first artists to show with Greenaway Art Gallery when we opened in 1992, and this particular painting has been in the Director’s personal collection since it was painted. The marriage of text, image and intimacy makes this one of Ian’s best works.
Jenny Watson
‘Hidden Painting’ (fuschia), 1991
two panels, acrylic and rabbit skin glue on Cambodian silk & tulle
50 x 76 cm each
$8,800 pair
Jenny Watson is an Australian artist known for her raw, autobiographical paintings. This work was presented in Personal Portraits at Annina Nosei Gallery in New York in 1991. Blending text with expressive, naïve figuration, her works often reference personal memories, feminist themes, and influences from punk culture. This exhibition continued her exploration of self-representation and storytelling, featuring paintings on unstretched fabric that evoke both intimacy and vulnerability. Watson’s work, characterised by a deliberately unpolished aesthetic, challenges traditional notions of portraiture and authorship, positioning her among key contemporary feminist artists.
Rosalie Gascoigne
Painted Words, 1988
spray painted masonite, wood cut outs on plywood board
82.5.52cm
$70,000
Rosalie Gascoigne (born New Zealand, 1917 - died Canberra, 1999) was the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice biennale in 1992. Her works are in collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as major museums in Australia and New Zealand. Painted Words (1988) is a quintessential example of Rosalie Gascoigne’s innovative approach to art. This work features her characteristic use of found materials—arranged to form bold, almost sculptural compositions. The painted letters and symbols evoke a dialogue between language and landscape, transforming everyday elements into visually striking forms. Gascoigne’s work often reflects her deep connection to the Australian environment, with Painted Words offering a meditation on both the literal and metaphorical significance of signs and symbols in shaping our understanding of place and identity.
Angela Valamanesh
Dark life no 3, 2018
ceramic on plywood backing
53.5 x 13.5 x 7.5cm
$4,400
Angela Valamanesh AO is known for her evocative ceramic and mixed-media works, which explore themes of nature, science, and the interconnectedness of life. Her practice draws on biological forms, microscopic structures, and museum specimens, blurring the line between organic and artificial. Earlier works featured muted, earthy tones, but more recently her palette has broadened. Her sculptures and installations evoke a sense of quiet mystery, inviting contemplation on evolution and the fragility of existence. Valamanesh’s work is deeply influenced by research into historical scientific illustrations and natural history archives, creating a dialogue between art and science that is both intimate and universal.
Yvonne Boag
Black Square, 2003
acrylic on canvas
183 x 276cm
$18,000
Yvonne Boag is an Australian artist whose work explores memory, place, and identity through bold colour and dynamic abstraction. Influenced by her experiences living between Australia, Scotland, and South Korea, her paintings, prints, and drawings capture shifting landscapes and emotional connections to space. Boag’s compositions often feature layered forms, gestural lines, and vibrant palettes, evoking both personal and collective narratives. Her work balances structure and spontaneity, reflecting the rhythms of urban and natural environments. Deeply engaged in art education and community projects, Boag’s practice extends beyond the canvas, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and creative exchange.
Imants Tillers
Untitled (Just So), 1998
acrylic, gouache, oil stick on canvas
60 x 60cm
$11,000
Imants Tillers is arguably Australia's preeminent post-modernist, best known for his distinctive mixed-media works that explore themes of memory, identity, and cultural history. Drawing on his background and experiences, Tillers creates large-scale paintings and installations that often combine texts, fragments of imagery, and references to both Western and Indigenous Australian art traditions. Influenced by ideas of displacement and the fluidity of cultural boundaries, his work reflects a deep engagement with the complexities of history and personal experience. This unique work was exhibited in an exhibition titled ONE-OFF : ONE-OFF : ONE-OFF An exhibition of anomalies from the artist’s normal practice in 2010.
Christian Thompson (Australian b.1988)
Untitled 6, from the series King Billy, 2010
C - Type Print, from an edition of 8
145 x 100cm
$10,500
Christian Thompson is an Australian artist of Bidjara heritage, whose work explores identity, culture, and the intersections of Indigenous and contemporary art. He is known for his striking photography, video art, and performance pieces that often challenge stereotypes and the representation of Indigenous peoples. Thompson's practice is deeply influenced by his heritage, addressing themes of colonialism, history, and self-representation. He draws on traditional Aboriginal iconography while integrating modern techniques to create a dialogue between past and present. His work reflects a complex narrative of belonging, survival, and the ongoing impact of cultural transformation.
James Tylor and Laura Wills
Haunted Landscape, Kangaroo Island, 2020
Pastel, pencil and pigment ink on paper
138 x 112cm, framed
$5,900
From 2016 to 2022 James Tylor and Laura Wills collaborated on new works that merge their own experiences of Australian colonial history. The Forgotten Wars 1 and 2 were the first series of drawings on photographic prints. They investigate the idea of mapping, conflict and colonialism. Both series alludes to the story of the Australian frontier wars. The Australian Frontier wars were a series of armed conflicts, massacres and battles that took place from 1788 to 1930’s between the invading British Government and Aboriginal Australians. During the wars the British Government dispersed Indigenous Australians of their land, removing them to asylums, missions or reserves. They were stripped of traditional culture, replacing it with English language, British culture and Christianity. This process of the British colonisation of Australian and the treatment of indigenous Australians was documented in the British Parliamentary papers and Commissioners reports on the colonisation of Australia. Works from the first series won National Works on Paper 2018, and the second series was acquired by Flinders University Art Gallery and Museum. Hidden Landscapes, Kangaroo Island, are subsequent works that explore the History of Kangaroo Island particularly the early sealers and Aboriginal Tasmanian women who lived there before European white settlement. This collaborative project between an Indigenous and a Non-Indigenous Australian artist helps to find a way to decolonise the telling of stories about Australian frontier history in mainstream society in Australia.
Fiona Hall
Headquarters of the Revolutionaries, 2008
Resin, from an edition of 8
32 x 30 x 30cm
$13,500 (perfect condition)
Fiona Hall AO (b 1953) is a photographer and sculptor. She represented Australia in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Fiona is of of Australia’s most consistently innovative contemporary artist. The brain and skull have been reoccurring themes in Hall’s art practise, this work was commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia as a fund raiser. It has never been unwrapped and is therefore in perfect condition.
Christian Lock
LIT, 2023
Oil, synthetic polymer, pigment, platinum silicone on canvas
160 x 136cm
$12,000
Christian Lock works in the "expanded field" of abstract painting. His past practice has integrated subcultural influences, especially from surf culture, with gestural expression, colour-field painting, collage and assemblage, locating them alongside the metaphysical concerns of early twentieth-century abstraction. His new work presents ambitious experiments with materials, surface, texture, and spray-painted pigment. These are entry points to explorations of intense visual experience, especially colour experience. For Lock, like the early twentieth-century abstractionists, colour brings with it a spiritual awareness. Lock also finds spiritual potential in technologically-mediated flows of energy and information. The colours, grids and geometric elements of his new work draw on these ideas, giving powerful and moving form to ideas that are at once visual, technological and cosmic.
Colour
Lock tells me that the intense blue that he uses in this series comes from the blue colour one can see when you press or rub your closed eyes. Such colour effects are called phosphenes. For some, these colours are just the electrical flickering of the visual system as it is prodded and pressed. For Lock, these colours are a symptom of another reality beyond or outside our physical world.
Jonathan Meese
GEFANGNIS OHNE MENSCHER, SEI LIEB
also TOLLER SCHLUPPER, 2008 -2009
Acrylic, mixed media on canvas
100 x 80cm
$35,000
Jonathan Meese is a German Conceptual artist working within a diverse practice that includes performance, installation, painting, and sculpture. Concerned with themes of power, desire, and identity, Meese often inserts his likeness into his paintings. “I exhume to consume. My body is the reactor in a huge rubbish-recycling-experiment of leaden world and intoxicated images,” the artist has explained of his expressive and animated works. Born on January 23, 1970 in Tokyo, Japan, he studied at the Academy of Art in Hamburg, but left without a degree. He presented one of his early installation works at the first Berlin Biennale, and has since gone on to exhibit at the Stuart Shave Modern Art in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Over the course of his career Meese has worked in collaboration with a number of important artists included Albert Oehlen, Jörg Immendorf, and Tal R. The artist’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Sammlung Goetz in Munich, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, among others. He currently lives and works between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany.
Meese's personal interests, including horror films, comic books, Outsider Art, and medieval crusades, are often reflected in his works. German Expressionism reflecting social discontent and the horrific realities of war regularly forms the basis for Meese's artwork. While self-portraits are a common component in many of Meese's works, his image is frequently transformed through a variety of characters, including divas and demons. These characters are commonly used to explore the reality of power. As a collective, Meese's works make gripping narratives. Meese is based in both Berlin and Hamburg. - Artnet
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Joseph Häxan
Talisman Cave, 2024
Archival inkjet print
80 x 65cm ($2,750 unframed)
Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Joseph Häxan is often described as a composite photographer and retouch artist whose cinematic imagery captures twisted eroticism and bacchanalian indulgence. While this characterisation is not without merit, it only partially captures the depth and complexity of this thought-provoking artist’s work. Häxan’s photographic oeuvre transcends mere sensationalism, delving into darker, more philosophical realms that provoke reflection on the human psyche and the occult.
The grotesque and unsettling scenes Häxan creates often evoke the sense of ritual, satanic rites, and mesmerism, drawing heavily from the symbolism of the occult. His images suggest an atmosphere of saturnalian excess, where the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical, the licit and the illicit, are blurred. These visuals could well serve as illustrations for Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim's De Occulta Philosophia (The Philosophy of the Occult), a text that seeks to synthesise natural and celestial forces in a unified metaphysical system. Similarly, Häxan’s work reflects a fusion of these domains, intertwining the natural world with the supernatural, and in doing so, creates a tension that is both alluring and disconcerting.
The photograph in question, shot earlier this year in the Alexandra Crystal Cave in southeastern South Australia, has never before been exhibited. While the image invites multiple interpretations, several elements within the scene appear to point toward the artist’s thematic preoccupations. The figure at its centre wears a talisman bearing a five-pointed pentacle—traditionally a symbol of spiritual protection, representing the classical elements of spirit, fire, water, earth, and air. This emblem may also function as a “Devil’s trap,” suggesting a deeper, more esoteric significance.
The figure itself appears to be both hidden and exposed, trapped within the cave’s stony recesses, as though it is fleeing from an unseen force or presence. There is a palpable sense of impending danger, perhaps even an approaching figure, placing the viewer in the position of the intruder, or the one who is about to disturb the sacred or the profane. The ambiguity of the image leaves room for personal interpretation, encouraging the viewer to confront their own perceptions of fear, protection, and the occult.
Ultimately, the interpretation of Häxan’s work remains open, inviting the viewer to engage in a dynamic and personal exploration of its many layers. The image stands as an enigmatic invitation to step into a world where the mystical, the profane, and the human psyche converge.
Sidney Nolan
African Head, 1963
Oil on compositional board
121 x 90.5cm, signed 'N', 'Nolan' lower right
Inscribed verso: 'Head Africa' 1st Jan 1963
Growing up in the sixties my artistic heroes were many, but the top of the Australian list was Sir Sidney Nolan. In 1992, when I launched my gallery, Kym Bonython, who had shown Nolan in the 1960s in Adelaide, kindly put me in touch with the man himself and one of the first exhibitions I had was that of Sidney Nolan’s paintings. Sadly, he wasn’t feeling well enough to travel to Adelaide for the opening and died suddenly during the exhibition period. This painting is thought to have been exhibited at Nolan’s London Gallery, Marlborough Fine Art in 1963.
This unmistakable Nolan painting demonstrates his loose and sometimes frenetic brushwork, often scraped back and over-laid with another coat with somewhat smudged features that nevertheless capture an ‘attitude' in the pose, of a proud Ugandan, cognisant of his country’s newly gained independence.
GAG ART ADVISORY is proud to offer for sale this major work.
Price is available upon application.
Exhibited
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Africa and Australia, Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne, UK, August 2008 no.6 titled 'Africa Head, 1st
January 1963' -
Sidney Nolan 'Heads', Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne, UK, 2014, no.13 titled 'Head (African) 1963'
Literature
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Lynn, E., Sidney Nolan: Myth and Imagery, Macmillan, London, 1967, p.42
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Curatorial Notes, Africa and Australia, Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne, UK, August 2008 illus. (col)
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Turley, A., "Mr Nolan I Presume?", Look AGNSW Magazine, Dec 2014, p.38 & p.39 illus. (col)
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Turley, A, Sidney Nolan's African Journey, Artist Profile Magazine Issue 41 Nov 2017 illus col. p. 123
Provenance
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Purchased from Lady Nolan in 2014 by current owner