About Clinton Nain

"Born in Melbourne, the artist Clinton Nain considers the history of his homeland in his potent paintings and performance art. Nain exposes the vicious crimes against traditional landowners of the country by European settlers, tackling these difficult subjects with a sophisticated wit and injecting a seemingly absurd humour. Nain’s life has been shaped by Aboriginal politics; he attended his first Aboriginal land rights protest when he was just one month old with his activist mother. Nain creates vivid abstract canvasses and employs domestic materials for his mediums, such as heritage coloured house paint, bitumen paint and household bleach. In his work the artist employs a range of motifs that refer to the dominant culture and are symbolic of its power, ranging from language, religion, land, country, crown to colonisation of the dispossessed. Though Nain’s work has a naive and unfinished quality, his exercises in paint are aesthetically and conceptually intellectual and highly developed. In fact the artist has been described as one of the most complex and visually subtle artists of his generation."