Opposite: Sidney Nolan, Untitled (detail), 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm. Image courtesy of the Sidney Nolan Trust.
Above: George C. Beresford, W.B. Yeats 1911. Image courtesy of the Hulton Archive.
AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY SIDNEY NOLAN & DANIEL MACCARTHY
17 SEPTEMBER - 24 OCTOBER 2025
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH The Sidney Nolan Trust, JGM Gallery presents Strange Heart Beating , an exhibition of recent paintings by Daniel MacCarthy and hitherto unseen works by the pioneering Australian Modernist, Sir Sidney Nolan (1917 1992).
In 2021, MacCarthy was the artist in residence at The Rodd, a 17th century Jacobean manor in Herefordshire where Nolan lived for the last decade of his life, and where the Trust he founded operates. During the course of this residency, MacCarthy was inspired by Nolan’s innovative handling of paint and his fearlessness in addressing confronting subject matter. He began to investigate Nolan’s techniques, making monoprints with the same kaolin-primed paper that the Australian Master used for his paintings of Leda and the Swan (1959). The paper’s glossiness, and the translucency of marks made on it, appealed to MacCarthy and prompted him to make a comparable series. These works on paper by MacCarthy and by Nolan are exhibited alongside one another in Strange Heart Beating
While undertaking his Sidney Nolan Trust residency, MacCarthy was also able to salvage and paint on some of Nolan’s unused canvases. While partly a matter of economy − a trait Nolan shared − MacCarthy’s use of this material suggests a kind of reverent appropriation. It reflects a desire to feel closer to Nolan, to inhabit his working space, and to absorb some lingering trace of the creative force that once moved there.
The exhibition takes its title from W.B. Yeats’ sonnet, Leda and the Swan (1923), in which Zeus, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda, leading to the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra, and subsequently to the Trojan War. This fable is the centrifugal point around which many of the exhibited works revolve, either depicting the story explicitly, or drawing on its themes and moral concerns. By exhibiting Nolan and MacCarthy’s work together, Strange Heart Beating explores a cross-generational dialogue on violence, beauty and the enduring power of myth.
It was during the 1950s, while living on the island of Hydra, that Nolan first engaged with the myths of Ancient Greece. Following a reading of The Iliad and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths he started to incorporate the contents of those texts into his own work. Years later, while undertaking a Harkness Fellowship in New York, he would return to these tales, executing many of the pieces shown in Strange Heart Beating as preparatory work for a series of much larger paintings on
board. Nolan’s Untitled I depicts a desertified landscape, its reddish tones reflecting the violence taking place on it. The bland, grey sky, and absence of geographical markers, creates a liminal space, referring to the ambiguity of when and where the scene is taking place. It is like Nolan is staging the act in a timeless space, the backdrop acting almost as a mirage. In all of his works on paper, the figures and landscapes are ethereal, suggesting their mythical status and the subconsciousness of their symbolism.
Inevitably, MacCarthy’s immersion in Nolan’s practice led to the transmission of the Australian’s thematic concerns into his own work. In particular, the themes of exploitation and expropriation explored in the Ancient Greek tale resonated with MacCarthy’s own ecological concerns. In Leda In Marble , for instance, the spotlit, reclining body of Leda immersed in a watery landscape suggests a post-apocalyptic scene in which the only remnant of humanity is its degrading monuments.
Compared to MacCarthy’s sculptural renderings of Leda, Nolan’s paintings are marked by a raw immediacy that reflect the myth’s intense psychological charge. For him, Leda is not an emblem, but a complex and multifaceted character − at once exposed and defiant, sensual and disturbed. In dialogue with Nolan’s works, MacCarthy’s paintings are sculptural, yet fragmented, rendered with a visceral physicality that captures moments of metamorphosis. Together, these works offer a perspective on myth as a site of living tensions, rather than static narratives − a space where enduring archetypes are destabilised and reimagined.
During Nolan’s years at The Rodd, the house and barns became a hub for visiting artists and composers, echoing the spirit of creative communities like Charleston, East Sussex, where experimentation and collaboration flourished. Strange Heart Beating highlights the importance of sites such as these for dialogue between contemporary artists and the art-historical figures who have preceded and inspired them.
Exhibited alongside the works in Strange Heart Beating , and giving broader context to Nolan’s life and work, are three paintings which have been generously loaned by private collectors within the United Kingdom. These include After The Bushfire (1950), Kelly & Storm (1963) and Gorilla (1963), which in 1963 was gifted to Princess Margaret by Nolan himself.
FOREWORD
BY SIMON MUNDY
DANIEL S ARTISTIC PEDIGREE is almost scary, going back to the Bloomsbury Group. Both his father, Charles, and his aunt, Sophie, are distinguished: Charles in paint and Sophie in ceramics. Daniel is just too young to have known Sir Sidney Nolan properly but, growing up only a few miles away from The Rodd, he has absorbed its atmosphere and Nolan’s work all his life. That familiarity with the heritage and the landscape imbues his work with instinctive understanding, reinforced when he was artist-in-residence there on his own during the COVID lockdown. The Rodd has become a place of inspiration for all manner of artists, from composers to environmental installation exponents, and that was one of Nolan’s main aims in setting up his Trust.
Daniel’s parents and I were frequent visitors to The Rodd during Nolan’s decade there (Daniel and my son were close as children too) and I know Sidney would have been delighted to find that the close connection between artists has been continued into another generation. Those family links have something of the same flavour as the connections between the Boyd family and Nolan in Australia and later in London. They give a context within which artists can find their own individual voice while taking the language and techniques of those around them.
Nolan often turned to myth and legend as a way to find allegories for his own preoccupations. The Greek story of Leda, pursued and raped by Zeus disguised as a swan, was one that fascinated him in the late 1950s when he had been spending time in the Greek islands and New York. His series of works on the theme was first exhibited in London in June 1960. Zeus had a nasty habit of using animals as surrogates for his lust. With Europa he occupied the body of a bull. With Leda he sired Helen of Troy, with Europa the myth of the Minotaur was born. As Daniel has said, “... the story contains many of the elements that already appear in my work; figures in nature, water and the eerie quality of threat.”
This exhibition is one in which so many threads come together. The power of myth in the Welsh borders, Australia and the Mediterranean, the dynasties of artists, the passing of generational torches, a tactile sense of the fluidity of time. I suspect Sidney Nolan would have been very pleased indeed.
SIMON MUNDY IS THE FORMER VICE-CHAIR OF THE SIDNEY NOLAN TRUST AND AUTHOR OF SIDNEY NOLAN: AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS LIFE AND LEGACY
A CHAMPION OF THE ARTS, HE HAS SERVED AS DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR THE ARTS AND VICE-PRESIDENT OF PEN INTERNATIONAL'S WRITERS FOR PEACE COMMITTEE. MUNDY ALSO CO-FOUNDED CULTURE ACTION EUROPE AND THE EUROPEAN FORUM FOR THE ARTS & HERITAGE; HE REMAINS AN ADVISER TO THE EUROPEAN FESTIVALS ASSOCIATION.
Opposite: Daniel MacCarthy, Leda In Marble (detail), 2025, oil on canvas, 153cm x 153cm. Image courtesy of Sergey Novikov.
Sidney Nolan, Untitled IV (detail), 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm.
Sidney Nolan Trust.
BEFORE & AFTER THE SWAN
BY JULIUS KILLERBY
JULIUS KILLERBY IS AN ARTIST AND THE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF JGM GALLERY. HE HAS PREVIOUSLY HELD POSITIONS AT THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION (2022 VENICE BIENNALE), METRO GALLERY, SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERY AND FLINDERS LANE GALLERY IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF HIS OWN PRACTICE, HE HAS EXHIBITED AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, THE ART GALLERY OF BALLARAT & NORITO
GALLERY (LONDON), AMONGST OTHER SPACES.
THROUGH THEIR DEPICTIONS of Ancient Greek mythology, Sidney Nolan and Daniel MacCarthy attempt to rationalise our past and imagine our future. Of particular interest to both artists is Leda and the Swan, a tale which describes both the rape of Leda by Zeus and that action s reverberation in history – specifically its role as the catalyst for the Trojan War. For Nolan, it was not a remote myth, but an enduring metaphor that expressed the cycles of violence and trauma that shape history, the “strange heart beating” of Yeats’ famous poem. MacCarthy, too, uses the myth as a symbolic framework, but one which informs his depictions of a post-apocalyptic world, where all that remains of humanity is its degrading monuments and displaced survivors, surrounded by a resilient – albeit tarnished – natural world.
During years spent on the Greek island of Hydra in the late 1950s, Nolan read e Iliad and Robert Graves e Greek Myths, incorporating the contents and themes of these works into his own. Before addressing Leda and the Swan, he considered ways in which he could depict the Trojan War itself, rather than the mythological event that triggered it. As Brian Adams writes in his biography of Nolan, Such Is Life (1987), “... Nolan developed the idea of Troy as a subject for a series of paintings. He was interested in it, not simply as a battle that had taken place quite near, on the other side of the Aegean, but as a composite subject incorporating memories of life in Australia. There might be the tragedy of drought or images of the naked swimmers at the St Kilda baths who had looked to him like Greek gods; elements of two entirely different worlds, separated by time and distance, and yet curiously linked in mood and spirit.” Nolan was searching for aesthetic mechanisms, then, that would connect these Ancient events and themes to his own era, and to his own country, if not universalise them altogether. It is perhaps for this reason that, when he did engage with Leda and the Swan, he would depict the tale’s protagonist as an almost mannequin-like figure, her body and face rendered with a simplification of features and narrative cues that universalised – rather than particularised – her experience.
"... SEPARATED BY TIME AND DISTANCE, AND YET CURIOUSLY LINKED IN MOOD AND SPIRIT."
- BRIAN ADAMS
Adams goes on to write that Nolan “... began to play with the idea in experimental ink and oil sketches, attempting to combine the weapons and accoutrements of the Trojan War, the human figures and the horses, with a landscape that might have been Central Australia, the flat plains of the Wimmera, or a country of his imagination.” This combination of elements from “two entirely different worlds” is evident in Untitled I, where Nolan situates Leda and Zeus in a desert landscape more reminiscent of Australia than Ancient Greece. Here, the violence is implied rather than explicitly depicted. The swan contemplates his victim in a sea of blood-red burnt sienna. Nothing is concretised, nothing made explicit, and nothing yet done. The mood is menace rather than crime itself. This horror by omission invites the audience to imagine the imminent action, rather than observe it, and has the effect of heightening the sense of trepidation and dread. This may also be why Nolan decided not to depict the typical events of war, but a myth about their origin in the “strange heart beating” – the heart of Zeus, of history, and of violence.
For much of Daniel MacCarthy’s career he has painted figures estranged from civilisation, wanderers in a post-apocalyptic landscape that, though sparsely populated, is often in a state of steady rejuvenation. In 2021, when he was awarded the Sidney Nolan residency, and while much of the world was grappling with the Covid-19 Pandemic, he must have felt the growing relevance of his work. In the momentarily deserted landscape surrounding The Rodd, a Jacobean Manor in Herefordshire where Nolan lived for the last decade of his life, and where the residency founded in his name is undertaken, MacCarthy would have seen an eerie resemblance to his own paintings. In Strange Heart Beating, he sublimates Leda and the Swan s themes of historical cause and effect into a metaphor for humanity’s fraught entanglement with the natural world, one marked by uneasy coexistence and, at times, perilous indifference to each other. Leda In Marble, one of the exhibition’s largest paintings, depicts a statue of Leda and a black swan, which lurks ominously in the foreground. Leda’s hand-crafted and desaturated form establishes her separation from the organic surroundings,
and underscores her immobility and helplessness as the current drifts past her. MacCarthy seems to suggest that nature will persevere with or without us, and as he said in a recent conversation with Antony Mottershead (Curator & Creative Producer of the Sidney Nolan Trust), “ I think in as much as these works are a kind of vehicle for my own musings on the future of humanity and nature, they contain my hope and belief that the resilience and tenacity of nature, as much as its indifference to us, will persist no matter what we throw at it.”
In contrast to most depictions of Leda and the Swan, where Zeus enters the terrestrial realm of humans, MacCarthy often sets the scene in water, the swan’s natural habitat. “ Water also has an elemental character as a destructive force, which we are increasingly seeing played out. I’ve made works about floods, which were about working with that feeling of something which can be simultaneously seductive, like a beautiful river and devastating, like a flood.” For MacCarthy, then, the environment itself embodies the traits that one would usually associate with only the swan, both “seductive” and “devastating”. In this way, he reverses the narrative of the myth, the peril arising not from Zeus’ descent into the world of mortals, but from Leda’s entrance into the alien, dangerous world of the swan. In Leda And e Black Swan, MacCarthy positions Leda beneath a tide of water, the swan bearing frighteningly down on her. Leda’s pallor and almost prenatal position foreshadows her pregnancy which, within MacCarthy’s pictorial logic, seems as much the result of the water rushing toward her, as of the swan’s imminent assault.
The art historian, Jonathan Brown, wrote that “... a masterpiece is a work that is inexhaustible and that continually reveals new aspects of itself. This capacity for renewal is crucial. It means that a masterpiece, the creation of which is tied to a specific time and place, nevertheless has the potential to transcend its moment of creation, and even the intentions of its creator, to say something important and
compelling to each new generation.”
The ancient myth of Leda and the Swan may not be, in a strict sense, a “masterpiece”, since there is no originating work, author or artist, but rather a cultural inheritance. Yet it is nonetheless like Brown’s concept of a masterpiece in its seemingly inexhaustible capacity for renewal. The story resonated with Nolan and subsequently MacCarthy, prompting them in different ways to reinterpret and extend its conceptual implications, creating new art from it. For Nolan, it was an origin story for war itself, an emblem for humanity’s cyclical entanglement with violence, and as relevant to Modernity as it was to Antiquity. For MacCarthy, it offered a lens through which to explore our relationship with the natural world, framing the swan as one part of an all-encompassing elemental force, one that both sustains and destroys.
FOOTNOTES
Yeats, W.B. (1990). Leda and the Swan. In: A.N. Jeffares, ed. W.B. Yeats: Selected Poetry. London: Pan Books, pp 71-72.
Adams, B. (1987). Such Is Life: e Biography of Nolan. Hutchinson Australia, pp 132.
Ibid.
MacCarthy, D. (2025). In conversation with Antony Mottershead.
Ibid.
Left: Sidney Nolan leaving Hydra, 1956. Image courtesy of The Sidney Nolan Trust.
Right: Daniel MacCarthy, Leda In Marble, 2025, oil on canvas, 153cm x 153cm. Image courtesy of Sergey Novikov.
DANIEL MACCARTHY & ANTONY MOTTERSHEAD IN CONVERSATION
Opposite: Sidney Nolan s mediums, 2025. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.
THE GREAT WINGS
ANTONY MOTTERSHEAD In 2021, you were a resident artist with the Sidney Nolan Trust for 12 months, culminating in e Peace of Wild ings, a substantial exhibition of new works. In those paintings, you drew attention to the edges, the unkempt margins of landscapes and also what appeared to be the margins of society. Can you say a little about those works?
DANIEL MACCARTHY Yes, I think margins is a good word for it. I often lack the vocabulary or perhaps the vantage point to articulate what’s happening in my paintings. In that body of work I was becoming interested in nettles, weeds and other marginalised plants and landscapes, as well as to an extent marginalised people. The characters in those works often felt like hermits, wanderers, foragers, people who were in one way or another dealing with the societal schism we have over centuries created between us and nature. As with the plant life that populates the work, these figures also represent a kind of allegorical approach to things. That s to say, they began to signify in my mind a kind of semiotics, a language of symbols, that was my code if you like for the fragility as well as the tenacity of nature and what that might be like when we are living more fully with the collapse and breakdown of our interconnected natural systems.
AM Water is another recurring symbol you employ in your work, as
are car and truck headlights. I’m interested in how you use these, both as symbols but also as structural devices in your work.
DM Water has always appeared in my work, largely because of the potential it offers for pictorial effects and abstractions. I have always enjoyed the illusory element of picture making that allows the eye to move between the object made of canvas and pigment, and the painting as a window into another world. Water and reflections offer us that same quality. Water also has an elemental character as a destructive force, one which we are increasingly seeing in the world. I’ve made works about floods, which were about working with that feeling of something which can be simultaneously seductive, like a beautiful river and devastating, like a flood. The headlights are similar in that they have a sort of double meaning. On the one hand they represent the destructive presence of humans in the environment. On the other they capture for me something much more bucolic, about country lanes at night, coming home late, with all the nettles and fox gloves dancing in the headlights. I suppose I’m drawn to imagery like this which can capture two quite distinct realities.
AM Your paintings frequently include figures in a landscape, often quietly engaged in some sort of activity, whether that be playing an instrument, tending the plants or rowing a boat. Who are these figures, and what do they signify?
talking about. At University I studied this period of nature writing and the birth of the environmental movement through writers like Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, and so on. There is a prophetic quality in the work which I have come to recognise in Nolan’s work too.
AM How has your painting continued to evolve since your residency with The Sidney Nolan Trust?
DM In our recent conversation with the writer, Ben Rawlence, as part of an interview for the Turps painting magazine, one thing he said that I think addresses how I feel with regard to this point is that “... whatever you’re doing now, you are existing in an atmosphere that has 440 parts per million Carbon dioxide… the Earth is chemically and physically different than it was when we were born.” A landscape painted now, even if it resembled in every way one made by a post impressionist, is by this very fact fundamentally different. And it follows that history will judge those two landscapes very differently, even if they look the same. Art which is made without this context, Ben points out, “... has nothing to say for posterity other than as an indication of how distracted and frivolous people were.” I think this is the unconscious decision behind my work, that it would be in a sense an anachronism to not portray the world we are in now.
AM Turning more specifically to this new exhibition, which is a partnership with JGM Gallery and The Sidney Nolan Trust. Like Sidney Nolan, you draw on literature, poetry, and philosophy as source material for your paintings. Can you say something about this relationship?
DM In terms of the evolution of my practice, I see that more in terms of painterly concerns than the subject matter, which remains much the same. During the residency, I got to know Sidney Nolan’s work quite well and came to love him as an artist, and this has informed my painting process. My material approach has shifted. I was given some old blank canvases of his and by experimenting with these, I discovered a preference for working on a very smooth surface. This allows for the paint to be applied at great speed, something I’m continuing to experiment with and in a way that I think mirrors Nolan’s approach to his materials.
AM In this latest exhibition with JGM, you’ll be presenting new paintings with a focus on the Greek Myth of Leda and the Swan. What prompted you to look at this story?
DM Well I suppose they are us, in a not-so-distant future, when we will have to figure out how to live with and within a natural order that we have disrupted. They represent humanity seeking to remember its primordial origins. At times they might be melancholic or ambivalent like the figure strumming a guitar in swan song. But I hope they also convey a sense of the hope that I get from being in nature.
AM These characters and their actions seem entirely innocent, yet the scenes also conjure a sense of the uncanny or convey a sense of threat.
DM They are somewhat haunted figures dealing with the trauma, anxiety and grief of being confronted with a new reality, whilst still having the memory of the world before the climate crisis. They are on a journey and it’s not a comfortable one, but hopefully there is room for tenderness, humour and joy too.
AM So, can we take hope from your paintings?
DM I think so. That’s certainly part of what I put in to them. And I think in as much as these works are a kind of vehicle for my own musings on the future of humanity and nature, they contain my hope and belief that the resilience and tenacity of nature as much as its indifference to us will persist no matter what we throw at it.
AM You speak specifically about the characters in your work in the context of the climate crisis. What conscious or unconscious decisions are you making as a painter working at a moment of climate chaos and biodiversity collapse?
DM I would say that for as long as I’ve been a studio painter, which is to say, sourcing my imagery from imagination and other secondary material in the studio, I have often found myself channeling the things which I m reading into the work. I don t read a lot of poetry, and I’m a long way from being as well read as Nolan was, but I often find certain poets trigger something in me visually. In my last show for example I found myself mining T.S Eliots e Wasteland for titles and in turn those lines helped to inform the paintings. So too in this show with JGM the poem about Leda and the Swan by W.B Yeats has come to influence the work as well as the title of the exhibition.
AM The title of your last exhibition with the Trust, e Peace of Wild ings is the title of a poem by the American writer, Wendell Berry. Berry sits within the canon of American nature writing and environmental activism with the likes of Aldo Leopold and Thoreau. I think there are some parallels that we might draw between the American West, the idea of the ‘frontier’ and the Australian colonial frontier that Nolan was painting.
DM I think it could be described as the settler colonial mindset as what became in the culture quite romanticised notions of unexplored wilderness, which unites both those times and places, and that same mindset still lies at the heart of many of the problems and injustices we face in the world today. What I was interested in with Wendell Berry and the other writers of the American school was their call for a return to nature in a sense, away from the rapidly industrialising world they were witnessing. This is a message we see a lot today but often it s a superficial consumerist approach to nature as a balm for us rather than the more radical realignment of where we exist as a species in an inter-dependent order that these writers were
DM I’ve been working alongside students at Hereford College of Art to help digitise many of Nolan’s works on paper. These include a wide range of themes and subjects, but a large number of the works in this particular section of the Trust’s collection are works about Greek Mythology, and Nolan’s fascination with the Gallipoli campaign. Of all these works, there is a small number of Leda and the Swan which really caught my eye.
AM The Leda story has been interpreted by countless writers and artists from Homer to Leonardo DaVinci, as well as many contemporary artists. How have you chosen to respond to the myth, and I guess Nolan’s interpretation?
DM I think with Nolan I share an interest in reinterpretations of ancient stories. It’s one of the many ways into his work I have found over the last 5 years. My attention was drawn to his Leda paintings in part because the story contains many of the elements that already appear in my work; figures in nature, water and the eerie quality of threat. As the legend goes, Leda, after the rape by Zeus in the guise of a Swan, bore children, notably Helen of Troy, who was the personification of beauty. But in other interpretations, they were the offspring of Nemesis, the goddess who punished those guilty of hubris. In my research into these myths I am struck by a feeling that despite their millennia old origins they have a very modern flavour. The Greek Gods were lustful, crude, vengeful and often despicable characters, especially in their dealings with mortals, in a way that seems completely at home in the political and social climate of today. So I suppose I am interested in how these ancient narratives might convey timeless truths about human societies and how that can be revealed by placing them within a modern context.
BEATING STILL
Opposite:
Sidney Nolan in Hydra, 1956. Image courtesy of The Sidney Nolan Trust.
Sidney Nolan, Untitled I, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled II, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled III, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled IV, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled V, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled VI, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled VII 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled VIII, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled IX, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled X, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled XI, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled XII, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled XIII, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled XIV 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 25.5cm x 30.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Untitled XV, 1959, dye on kaolin-primed paper, 30.5cm x 25.5cm
Sidney Nolan, After The Bushfire, 1950, oil on board, 62cm x 75.5cm
Sidney Nolan, Kelly & Storm, 1963, ripolin on composition board, 89.5cm x 122cm
Sidney Nolan, Gorilla, 1963, oil on board, 24.8cm x 29.9cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Cynara 2025, oil on canvas, 107cm x 107cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Narcissus As A Young Girl, 2025, oil on canvas, 107cm x 107cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda & The Black Swan, 2025, oil on canvas, 153cm x 107cm
Daniel MacCarthy, The Rape Of Gaia, 2025, oil on canvas, 153cm x 107cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Paris, 2025, oil on canvas, 51cm x 41cm
Daniel MacCarthy, The Draftsman, 2025, oil on canvas, 30cm x 26cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda & Mountains (detail), 2025, oil on canvas, 40cm x 30cm. Image courtesy of Sergey Novikov.
Daniel MacCarthy, Forest Fire, 2025, oil on canvas, 43cm x 33cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda In Marble, 2025, oil on canvas, 153cm x 153cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda & Mountains, 2025, oil on canvas, 40cm x 30cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Ship Of Fools, 2025, oil on canvas, 160cm x 180cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda Escapes, 2025, monoprint, 42cm x 37cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Leda & The Swan Pedalo, 2025, monoprint, 30cm x 25cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Figure By A Lake I, 2025, monoprint, 30cm x 25cm
Daniel MacCarthy, Figure By A Lake II, 2025, monoprint, 30cm x 25cm
JGM GALLERY EXTENDS ITS DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO DANIEL MACCARTHY AND THE SIDNEY NOLAN TRUST FOR THEIR GENEROSITY AND INVALUABLE COLLABORATION, AS WELL AS
TO THE PRIVATE COLLECTORS WHO HAVE GRACIOUSLY LOANED WORKS FOR 'STRANGE HEART BEATING'.
THIS EXHIBITION WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THEIR SUPPORT.
Left to right: Daniel MacCarthy, Antony Mottershead (Curator & Creative Producer of The Sidney Nolan Trust), Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi (Director of JGM Gallery), Sophie Heath (Director of The Sidney Nolan Trust), and Julius Killerby (Associate Director of JGM Gallery), 2025. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.
Editorial design: Julius Killerby.
Photography: Julius Killerby, The Sidney Nolan Trust & Daniel MacCarthy ’
Artwork Photography: The Sidney Nolan Trust & Sergey Novikov.
