‘Charged with horror and anguish’: Arthur Boyd’s nightmarish Nebuchadnezzar series opens in major new Bundanon show

Not for the faint-hearted, this is the first large-scale presentation of the Australian artist’s anti-Vietnam war, hallucinatory works since the late 60s On a fine day, the bushland surrounding Bundanon Art Museum is sunbathed and effortlessly resplendent. Inside the gallery, visitors are confronted with a surreal landscape charged with horror and anguish; nightmarish and fantastical visions of a figure wandering through a wilderness, tortured by fire and transformed into a clawed and feathered beast; crouching, contorted, on all fours. The hallucinatory paintings by the Australian artist Arthur Boyd chronicle the downfall of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar: a conqueror punished by God for his hubris, sentenced to seven years’ exile and insanity, living as an animal in the wilderness. Boyd embarked on the extraordinary series while living in London in the late 1960s, drawing on his horror at the Vietnam war and a series of protests involving self-immolation. The myth and modern context proved fertile territory for the artist, spawning about 100 paintings, pastels and drawings, and spanning to the 90s. Almost 50 of these artworks are presented in the exhibition Man on Fire: V