With the 2018 exhibition entitled, Fred Williams: Weipa series, Cape York, Cairns Art Gallery presented the first exhibition in Australia to bring together thirty works in that ground-breaking series. The exhibition was based around a work in gouache purchased for the Collection in 1999, entitled Bushfire, Weipa I. 

In the Fred Williams: Collection in Focus exhibition additional works that were since acquired by and gifted to the Gallery’s Collection are on view.

Fred Williams (1927-82) is regarded as one of Australia’s most respected and influential twentieth-century artists. He is best known for his distinctive depictions of the Australian landscape, taking these to a new level of modernity and abstraction with elements of landscape reduced to simple image markings on a flat plane of striated colour.

In 1977, Williams flew to Weipa on the west coast of Cape York in Queensland. For the first time he saw the vastness of the Australian landscape from an aerial perspective. This experience had a profound effect on Williams and led to the creation of the Weipa series in his Melbourne studio, drawing upon his photographs, sketches and spontaneous recollections. Williams extended his gouache painting techniques to capture a luminous sea and the air mingling with intense mineral-earth colours.

Williams was the first Australian artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1977, while three years later the Weipa series was exhibited in Paris, captivating audiences.

The purchase of Inlet Weipa in 2014 by the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation led Lyn Williams to donate a further three works to the Collection in the same year, bringing the total number of Weipa gouaches to eight in the Collection. Cairns Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia together have the largest holdings of this series, and the Gallery’s acquisitions enabled further research into significant art responding to our region.