James Gleeson AO is Australia’s best-known surrealist artist. Deeply interested in psychology, he wrote poetry, essays and books, and was a tireless supporter of Australian modern art. As a child he lived at Gosford on the NSW central coast and much of his work has been inspired by rock pools, full of ‘biomorphic forms’. For Gleeson the littoral zone where sea meets land was a powerful metaphor for the interplay of the conscious and unconscious mind and the fluid nature of existence. This can be seen in Gleeson’s study for his enormous painting Portrait of the artist as an evolving landscape, which was a 1994 Archibald Prize finalist. In the surreal composition, the artist’s fragmented face materialises out of the drawing. Gleeson reflected that ‘One of the most important and constantly recurring motifs throughout my work is based on a sense of the mutability of all forms and substances. Metamorphosis has always been, for me, one of the basic facts of life. Everything takes on a form, changes, falls apart and reforms in new organisations in an endless cycle.’
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Ray Wilson OAM in memory of James Agapitos OAM 2011
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of James Gleeson
James Gleeson (age 76 in 1991)
Ray Wilson OAM (1 portrait)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Christopher Chapman takes a trip through the doors of perception, arriving at the junction of surrealism and psychoanalysis.
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