Image: Dean Cross, False Starts and Dead Ends (or a life lived in art), 2026. Courtesy the artist and Station Gallery. Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra
Canberra Museum and Gallery will launch ‘Dean Cross X Sidney Nolan: Two Heads’ on 26 September, bringing new and recent paintings by the Worimi artist into the institution’s Nolan Gallery. The exhibition launch, scheduled for 2–3pm, will include a Welcome to Country by Aunty Dr Matilda House OAM, followed by an informal walkthrough with Cross and senior curator Virginia Rigney.
Framed as a play on the adage that two heads are better than one, ‘Two Heads’ approaches the relationship between Cross and Nolan as a speculative collaboration across time. Cross has long been interested in Nolan’s work, but the project does not present the two artists as interchangeable. Instead, it examines shared and divergent approaches to painting, including the ways history, place and identity are represented through visual language.
Cross describes the exhibition as developing through “parallel modes of making, one drawn from Nolan and another drawn from Country and my connection to it as a Worimi man”. The paintings engage with what the artist calls the “intersections and divergences of Western and non-Western modes of creative production”, while asking what new models might be developed that centre First Nations voices.
The works draw on material strategies associated with both artists’ practices, including collage, theatricality, found objects and spray paint. The exhibition also engages with several narratives in Nolan’s work: the masking of identity in his Ned Kelly series; the colonial unease within an occupied land explored by Nolan and Robert Helpmann in ‘The Display’, the 1964 Australian Ballet production; and the layering and disguising of personal memories in Nolan’s late series ‘Untitled (Heads)’ from 1983.
The presentation forms part of a broader suite of initiatives marking the 50th anniversary of Nolan’s gift of major painting series to the nation. Canberra Museum and Gallery’s related programming includes ‘Nolan50’, a year-long programme of exhibitions, concerts, talks and a symposium running from 13 March 2025 to 27 June 2027. The museum also presents ‘Public Impressions: Sidney Nolan in Popular Media’, on view through 13 September 2026, which examines how magazines helped establish Nolan’s public and international reputation.
‘The Nolan Collection’, described by the museum as an iconic group of paintings made between 1945 and 1953 and gifted to the nation in 1974, provides further institutional context for the new project. ‘Two Heads’ is supported by Creative Australia, with Cross represented by Station Gallery. The exhibition is listed to run from 27 September 2026 to 27 June 2027 at Canberra Museum and Gallery in Canberra, Australia.
