Strange Heart Beating: An exhibition of works by Sidney Nolan (1917 − 1992) & Daniel MacCarthy.

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. MacCarthy 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 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. Nolan and MacCarthy’s interpretations of the myth offer modern and contemporary reinterpretations of its subject matter. By exhibiting their work together, Strange Heart Beating explores a cross-generational dialogue on violence, beauty and the enduring power of myth.

It was during the 1950s, whilst 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. A bird which was once a heron in MacCarthy’s Leda In Marble, for instance, was later reworked as a black swan. In particular, the themes of exploitation and expropriation in the Ancient Greek tale resonated with MacCarthy’s own ecological concerns. By example, and in the same painting, 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.