A play on the old adage that two heads are better than one, Two Heads presents a series of new and recent paintings by Dean Cross in the Nolan Gallery at Canberra Museum and Gallery.

Cross has long been interested in the work of Sidney Nolan, and this exhibition has evolved as a speculative collaboration across time. He describes the project as emerging through “parallel modes of making, one drawn from Nolan and another drawn from Country and my connection to it as a Worimi man”.

The works in the exhibition draw on shared material approaches to painting, incorporating collage, theatricality, found objects and spray paint, while also engaging with key narratives. These include the masking of identity explored in Nolan's Ned Kelly series; questions of colonial Australia's unease within an occupied land, addressed by Nolan and Robert Helpmann in The Display (1964, The Australian Ballet); and Nolan's late series Untitled (Heads) (1983), in which personal memories are layered and disguised through familiar visual tropes.

The exhibition is grounded in Cross's exploration of the “intersections and divergences of Western and non-Western modes of creative production, and what new models can be developed that centre First Nations voices”.

This project is supported by Creative Australia.

The exhibition forms part of the Nolan50 program marking the 50th anniversary of Sidney Nolan's gift of major painting series to the nation.

Dean Cross is represented by Station Gallery.