For more than four decades, Mike Nicholls has practised a quiet, methodical art of reduction. The Melbourne sculptor and painter traces his beginnings to a farm in Narre Warren North and to the raw, expressionist energy of ROAR Studios, the artist collective that, through the 1980s, set itself against the conventions of the day. From those formative years among Melbourne's figurative painters, he has forged a singular path: paring imagery back to its elemental core, distilling each form until only what carries expression, soul and the human spirit remains.
An enduring Australianness runs through the work, drawn from a life of looking closely at this country. Certain landscapes read you before you read them, and Nicholls' have been earned slowly: as a young artist on remote cattle stations in central Queensland; on nomadic plein air journeys across Australia, Spain and South Georgia Island in the Antarctic; and in repeated returns to the Cape York Peninsula, where he has led woodcarving workshops in the Indigenous communities of Lockhart River, Aurukun and Moa Island in the Torres Strait.
His works are made to be contemplated. In the sculpture, colloquial motifs are coaxed from single timbers, and a selection of carved forms is now being cast in bronze. In the paintings, oil on linen, the same economy holds: a bottle on a ledge, a bird settled on an egg, a small solitary figure at the edge of grey water, a dark headland meeting the horizon. Set within the landscape, the sculptures weather and belong to their surroundings rather than impose upon them, seeking to leave as little an impression upon the skin of this world as possible.
Nicholls has held more than forty solo exhibitions, among them four curated retrospectives in public galleries, and taken part in more than ninety group exhibitions. His work is held in significant collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery. He is the winner of the Montalto Sculpture Prize (2018) and the Moonee Valley Art Prize (2006).