the distance between then & now: james clayden, sydney nolan, david thomas, jenny watson, fred williams
The Distance Between Then & Now
09.07.25 - 02.08.25
BLOCKPROJECTS presents The Distance Between Then and Now, a cross-generational exhibition curated by artist and gallerist Jeremy Kibel.
Here, time is not measured in years but in layers of memory, perception, and material. Bringing together five Australian artists, Jenny Watson, James Clayden, Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan, and David Thomas, the exhibition showcases works that span decades yet share a sustained engagement with the temporal nature of image-making.
Each artist navigates time in distinct ways: through autobiographical symbolism, gestural abstraction, reimagined landscape, or conceptual stillness. This is not a historical survey, but a meditation on how the past continues to shape the present and how painting can hold that continuity.
James Clayden, whose practice spans painting, experimental cinema, theatre, and music, contributes his monumental triptych Morning Window #1, #2, #3 (each 244 × 122 cm). Dense and immersive, these works hover between presence and dissolution. Writing on Clayden’s 2020 exhibition at BLOCKPROJECTS, critic Adrian Martin described his painting as “a game of fleeting projection and recognition... the eternal mystery of the horizon.” In Clayden’s hands, that horizon is less a boundary than a zone of psychological tension where form dissolves, re-emerges, and remains suspended.
Fred Williams’s Fallen Tree (1966) is a compact yet commanding painting in which the Australian bush is orchestrated with precision. Dominant vertical trunks are interrupted by the angled fall of a single gum, all framed within a circular composition that asserts quiet structural control. Williams once remarked that when the landscape offered “no focal point,” it had to be built into the paint. In Fallen Tree, the circle becomes a point that concentrates the eye and resolves the visual tension between vertical, diagonal, and horizontal movement.
What might in life appear unremarkable, a tree downed among others, becomes, through colour, compression, and painterly texture, an event of perception. Bark emerges through dragged pigment; the ground lifts gently toward a clear horizon. The everyday becomes extraordinary. The painting reads like a chord: upright trunks sustain the rhythm, the fallen tree cuts across it like an interval, and the horizon holds the final note. It’s a work that evokes “the seeing of sound and the sound of seeing” a synaesthetic charge common to Williams’s most poetic abstractions. Exhibited in Dealer’s Choice at Rudy Komon Gallery in January 1968, Fallen Tree stands as a pivotal expression of Williams’s evolving formal language.
Sidney Nolan’s Parkville (1944–45), a rarely seen early work, offers a lyrical portrait of wartime Melbourne suburbia. With softened contours and flattened perspective, the work captures not topographical specificity, but the mood of a moment. Formerly held by the Sidney Nolan Trust and exhibited at ICA London in 1962, Parkville trades the theatrical intensity of the Ned Kelly series for a quieter, more introspective atmosphere where houses, trees, and telegraph poles settle into a gently pulsing rhythm.
Jenny Watson’s Anointing (1991), first exhibited at Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, is a symbolic, intimate work rendered on fabric. Pairing stylised figuration with diaristic text, Watson’s visual language, shaped by feminist discourse and punk sensibility, transforms lived experience into archetype. Her paintings blur the line between confession and construction, where memory becomes a shared, visual script.
David Thomas’s Untitled (1990-1991), exhibited publicly for the first time, was painted during his residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Modest in scale and meditative in tone, the work reflects Thomas’s sustained inquiry into perception, light, and temporality. “I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to revisit these earlier pieces from my younger days,” he reflects not with nostalgia, but with renewed presence. This quiet painting rewards slow looking, offering a stillness that lingers beyond the canvas.
While diverse in approach, what unites these five artists is not a shared movement or moment, but a profound commitment to painting as a durational, meaning-making act. Their works resist spectacle and urgency, instead favouring depth, return, and resonance.
As Jeremy Kibel observes: “This exhibition is not about nostalgia. It’s about what persists what painting still carries after everything else has passed.”
Each work here reflects a lifelong dedication to painting not as a performance or product, but as a process. These are not images designed for quick consumption or instant affirmation. They are shaped through quiet attention: to place, to material, to memory. And it is within that space between intention and perception, between then and now, that something enduring continues to unfold.
ARTWORKS:
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david thomas : small works
David Thomas
07.09.22-01.10.22
Blockprojects Images | Installation Images courtesy of Heide Museum MOMA : Love Poem to Life 6th August - 6th November, 2022.
“It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.” - Pierre Bonnard
ON PAINTING AND TIME
PAINTING’S RESURRECTION. As a young art student in the 1970s I learnt that painting was dead, not house painting, the other sort, on canvasesand the like. Apparently painting in the Western world died again in1980s after a “reactionary” revival. Recently however the situation has changed in Australia and abroad. Painting is back. (To be honest it never went away, all that was for dramatic effect). Today the radical potential of paintingisbeing re-valued and resurrected asa dynamic generator of ideas, forms,of knowing and feeling. Painting’s radicalism, complexity, diversity, materiality, historicity as a mobile field of imaginative and material play, reflection and research is being explored more now than ever.
ARTWORKS:
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now & then : 40 years of abstraction
08.04.2022 – 16.04.2022
Installation images, Now & Then : 40 Years of Abstraction . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract works from the last 40 years.
ARTISTS:
Steven Asquith, Neil Keith Baker, Stephen Bram, Merric Brettle, James Clayden, Dan Dan Dai, Robert Jacks
Dale Frank, Marc Freeman, Denise Green, Kyle Jenkin, Michael Staniak, John Nixon, Julia Powles, David Thomas, Vivian Cooper Smith, Tom Vincent, Peter Westwood, what.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
THE DIRECTOR’S CHOICE 2021: important australian & international works of art.
17.04.2021 – 28.04.2021
Installation images, The Director’s Choice 2021: Important Australian and international Works of Art. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Angela McKinnon
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract and figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture by important Australian and International artists.
ARTISTS:
Tony Bevan,
James Clayden, Adam Cullen, Robert Jacks, John Olsen, David Thomas, Tony Tuckson, Ben Quilty, Brett Whiteley, Ken Whisson, Fred Williams.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
David Thomas: Moving Times
03.03.21 - 03.04.21
Installation images, David Thomas; Moving Times. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Christo Crocker.
An exhibition of paintings and photopaintings by David Thomas
This exhibition includes large paintings, primarily monochromatic in nature, large scale photopaintings from the ongoing Impermanences Series; and smaller photo paintings from the Water/Wash Series.”
Please see the accompanying publication “David Thomas: Moving Times”, available for purchase from the gallery.
BOOK YOUR APPOINTMENT to visit the gallery.
ARTWORKS:
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HOW SOON IS NOW
12.08.20 - 12.09.20
Installation images, How Soon is Now. Blockprojects, 2020.
Blockprojects is proud to present, HOW SOON IS NOW,
an exhibition featuring fifteen contemporary artists who explore the mystery of abstraction.
ARTISTS:
Darren Munce
Julia Powles
Eduardo Santos
David Thomas
Tom Vincent
David Wallage
Peter Westwood
Neil Keith Baker
Merric Brettle
James Clayden
Dandan Dai
Robert Doble
Marc Freeman
Kyle Jenkins
Jason Haufe