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

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, where the horizon line is removed to create a seamless melding of the sky and land, and elements of the landscape are reduced to simple image markings on a flat plane of striated colour.

Williams travelled to Queensland in mid-1971 and 1973. The experience expanded his colour palette to include the rich purples and greens of the rainforests and tropical vegetation of the region.

In 1977, Williams made his first light plane flight, travelling to Weipa on the west coast of Cape York, 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 what many still consider his finest works – the Weipa series.

Comprising around 50 works painted in his Melbourne studio, Williams’ Weipa series drew upon the photographs, sketches and spontaneous recollections of his aerial experiences over several days. For these works Williams extended his gouache painting techniques to capture the immediacy of witnessing a luminous sea and the air mingling with intense mineral-earth colours.

New compositional formats arose in the Weipa series. The work, Bauxite Coastline II 1977 shows strips of sea and land without horizons, suggesting an infinity of coastline. Williams continued to explore this compositional device as an integral part of his ongoing practice. The overall dynamism of Williams’ Weipa series seems to derive from his synthesis of abstraction, realism and recollection.

In the same year that Williams flew to Weipa he became the first Australian artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1980 works from the Weipa series were exhibited in Paris, captivating audiences and taking Australian landscape painting by late 19th-century impressionist artists to a new level of modernity and abstraction.

Dr Deborah Hart, Head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia wrote the first dedicated essay on the significance of the Weipa series for this exhibition.

The purchase of Inlet Weipa in 2014 by the 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.