Art

Tom Nicholson's 'Cartoons for Joseph Selleny' (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

by Grazia Gunn •

ABR Arts • 30 July 2015

Art

Tom Nicholson's 'Cartoons for Joseph Selleny' (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

by Grazia Gunn •

ABR Arts • 30 July 2015

Tom Nicholson is a Melbourne artist whose work explores the past in multiple ways, through image and textual narrative. The scale of his art is big. Last year the Art Gallery of New South Wales dedicated an entire gallery to his Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, a work commemorating the Viennese landscape painter and lithographer Joseph Selleny (1824–75), who served as the official artist on the Imperial Austrian frigate Novara which visited Sydney with a scientific retinue in August 1858, recording, documenting, and carrying back to Vienna many items of anthropological interest.

Grazia Gunn

Grazia Gunn is a Melbourne-based historian, art curator and critic. She taught Modernism in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge from 1995 to 2003. A former Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (1989–91), she was curator in the department of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia (1981–89), curator of the Monash collection (1975–79), and curator at the Melbourne University Gallery (1971–73). She was project officer, International and Australian Touring exhibitions, Visual Arts Board, Australia Council (1974–75). At the 1988 Venice Biennale she was commissioner and curator for the Australian Pavilion. She has published extensively on contemporary art in Australia and overseas, and is the author of Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images (1985). Her current project is The Modernization of Egypt and the Dynamics of Cultural exchange 1798–1882.