David Noonan: Films and Paintings 2001–2005 comprised a selection of recently made gouaches, bleach paintings, oil paintings, collages, films and installations, alongside a new commissioned film installation developed specifically for the Monash University Museum of Art. The exhibition was the culmination of critically acclaimed exhibitions Noonan had held in New York, Chicago, Melbourne and Sydney from 2001 to 2005; and coincided with the publication of a new monograph on the artist written by Dr Johannah Fahey and published by Thames and Hudson. Noonan’s complex layering of distinct historical and contemporary cultural motifs moves across time and space, encompassing the histories of modernism, science fiction, parapsychology, horror and the gothic, among other cultural reference points from art, film literature, music, fashion and pop culture.

Integrating painting, film and sculpture in all-encompassing installations that resemble cinematic sets, and absorbing decorative interiors, Noonan created intriguing, scenographic spaces that enveloped the spectator. Max Delany, then MUMA’s artistic director, observed how Noonan’s work evokes a world of emotional intensity, replete with moody ambience: ‘At once filmic and painterly, David Noonan’s moving pictures suggest timeless narratives of intrigue and suspense. Like the best cinema, David’s works are as much about feeling as they are about looking’, he said.

An acclaimed painter, David Noonan is also a video, film and new media artist. Jarrod Rawlins, co-director of Uplands Gallery, which represented the artist at the time, said: ‘David Noonan is a multi-task master, old school and new school, not versus’. Noonan’s work from the mid-2000s engages a breathtaking array of historical forms and cultural references, from the romantic sublime of centuries past, through exotic, ‘folk-modernist’ tendencies of 1970s bohemia and hippie culture, to the more ethereal and sinister sensibilities of gothic film and fiction.

With paintings depicting lovers, dreamy and coiled in states of sleep and embrace, pervasive throughout Noonan’s paintings is an interest in the representation of the sensual (and more sinister sensibilities) underlying popular culture, while his films explore transgressive and subliminal themes, and states of ‘interiority’ and ‘otherworldliness’.

Voted one of ‘Australia’s 50 most collectable artists’ in 2005, Noonan has continued to enjoy success and remains innovative. To coincide with the exhibition, MUMA published an artist’s book, designed by David Noonan in collaboration with Yanni Florence, with contributions by Max Delany and a keynote text by Jennifer Higgie, then editor of the internationally acclaimed Frieze magazine.

^{Image: David Noonan: Films and Paintings 2001–2005, installation view, Melbourne University Museum of Art, 2005}