James Gleeson, A Masked Alert, 2001. Oil on canvas, 175 x 220cm. Copyright: The Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation / AGNSW. Courtesy: Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.

A selection of paintings and watercolours.

All works come from the Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation which is managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This is the 9th exhibition held since 2000 at Charles Nodrum Gallery of Australia’s most committed surrealist painter. It includes a selection of oils from the 1990s and a suite of watercolours that the artist made in his final year when he was no longer able to handle large paintings and so focused exclusively on works on paper.

In the early 1980s, after his retirement from his secondary career as an author, critic and curator, Gleeson devoted himself exclusively to painting and, to the surprise of all, the first exhibition of this sexagenarian proved to be an impressive display of monumentally scaled paintings with a sheer painterliness and an ambiguous level of abstraction which left viewers puzzling as to how these astonishing performances could be interpreted – a situation which continues to this day.

His retrospective exhibition James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia in 2004-5.