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Antony Gormley RA. Photo: Lars Gunderson. The Red Continent comes to the heart of London. Modernist landscape, which became somewhat bleached out in St Ives, took root, became original and hardened in the desert of Australia.
When I think of Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams or Arthur Boyd, I think of harsh earth and fierce sunlight. Through its new occupiers, somehow Australia produced modernist vigour. Burke and Wills' 1860 expedition across the centre of the continent left few survivors, and likewise, the European picturesque (although this exhibition contains a few examples) withered in the heat.
The works of the Indigenous Australians like those of Rover Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye show the land speaking in the dream mapping of its original inhabitants. While artists from a deracinated European tradition continue to make pictures, the native Australian maps the experience of being the land and allows it to move through him or her. There is a directness in the Indigenous traditions, whether the dots of the Western Desert or the colour field paintings of the Great Sandy Desert, where pigment is used to carry mineral truth as well as lived feeling.
Today's artists continue this uncompromising confrontation. Shaun Gladwell treats the road as surrogate drawing. Tracey Moffatt takes complex human relations and sets them against the insistent reality of the land: no landscape, no escape.
Don't miss the works in this show which weld fact to imagination.
