Art Forum: Virginia Rigney

At speed: Sidney Nolan and spray
Virginia Rigney, Senior Curator Visual Art Canberra Museum and Gallery

Throughout the 1980s, in what was to be the last decade of his practice, Sidney Nolan came to work primarily work with aerosol paint. The medium was both new and old for him. This presentation will draw the connections between the earliest years of Nolan’s practice in the 1930s and works from these later years, some made at Bundanon and others at a new permanent studio space in the unlikely surroundings of a 16^th century barn. There Nolan was able to push the physicality and materiality of spray but also work with the inherent political urgency and energy of the medium.

Virginia Rigney is a Curator, Writer and Creative Producer who has worked with artists and collections to develop exhibitions, publications, installations, short films, and public programs. Educated at ANU and the USyd, she has worked in curatorial roles at the PowerHouse Museum, AGNSW, Glasgow Museums and Gold Coast City Gallery.

At CMAG Virginia works closely with the Sidney Nolan collection which includes over 220 works by the artist. Projects have included the collection re-hang and the curation of focused exhibitions in dialogue with the permanent display, including The Total Work of Art — Sidney Nolan and the Stage (2025), eX de Medici: Sidney Nolan ‑Guns and Flowers ( 2023), Finding the Dry Heart Nolan in Central Australia (2022), Jingo was born in the Scrub — Photographs by Mathew Thorne from Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2022) Memory and Modernism Sidney Nolan’s St Kilda (2020).