Curated by Dr Anne-Marie Jean, Material Nature is a group exhibition on display at the University Drill Hall Gallery, in Canberra [located Kingsley Street, Australian National University], from 20 June – 10 August, 2025.
We’re thrilled to announce the exhibition includes the work of John Peart. Peart’s work also features in the Australian National University Collection.
Material Nature looks to the power of materials to engage our multi-sensory experience of the natural world. With a focus on embodied awareness, the conventional idiom of landscape painting is collapsed, the viewer no longer positioned outside nature, but within. Works by artists Ros Auld, Manini Gumana, Jahnne Pasco-White, John Peart, Ana Pollak, Annika Romeyn, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Garawan Wanambi invite contemplation of our inter-relations with ecologies.
Opening: 19 June, 6pm
Exhibition Dates: 20 June – 10 August, 2025
..Excerpt on John Peart:
John Peart
John Peart is recognised as a significant Australian abstract artist whose diverse and prolific artistic career spanned nearly 50 years. He was born in 1945 in Brisbane and died at Wedderburn, NSW in 2013.
In 1962 at the age of 16, Peart left his hometown of Brisbane and moved to Sydney to pursue his career as a painter. He soon befriended gallery director Frank Watters and it was the beginning of a long artist/gallery relationship. Watters Gallery represented Peart’s work from 1965 until the gallery closed in 2018.
Throughout the late 1960’s and 1970’s Peart lived and worked in the US, Europe, UK and India. In 1975 he returned to Sydney where he continued to paint and began teaching at the National Art School. In the early 80’s he was invited by fellow artist Roy Jackson to join the Wedderburn community of artists in NSW where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
Peart’s oeuvre varies across the decades demonstrating an exuberant drive for experimentation and a lifelong curiosity that informs his work.
Over the course of his career, Peart held over 35 solo exhibitions and was involved in a significant number of group exhibitions. His paintings featured in major curatorial exhibitions including the 1968 exhibition ‘The Field’ at National Gallery of Victoria; ‘Recent Australian Art’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1973); and ‘Field to Figuration’ at the National Gallery of Victoria (1986). He was the recipient of a number of major art prizes, having won the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1997 with his work ‘Nandi Moon’, the Sulman Prize in 2000, and was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 1998. In 2004, the Campbelltown Arts Centre organised a retrospective exhibition ‘John Peart – Paintings 1964-2004′ which toured galleries throughout Australia, including the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra. John Peart’s works are held in the National Gallery of Australia as well as all State Galleries and many private and corporate collections throughout Australia.
From The Estate of the late John Peart
King Street Gallery on William, Sydney and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne represent the John Peart Estate.
