Constantine Nicholas is an Australian visual artist working across painting, drawing, installation, and digital media. His practice is driven by recurring themes of light, darkness, abstraction, and identity, often using processes that resist conscious control and unconventional materials such as sandpaper, pigment, and furniture remnants.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, Nicholas holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Australian National University and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Art Studies from the University of New South Wales, and lives in Sydney. He has held more than 30 solo exhibitions and 50 group exhibitions since the late 1980s, and his work is held in public collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Australian National University.A 2005 review in the State of the Arts newsletter described his “rich surface layers” as “an echo of the opulence of the colonial eras”, contrasted with black and red passages set against gold and silver gloss finishes.
His commissions include a millennium mural for Kerry Stokes' Sydney office in 2000 and murals for Suntec City Towers 3 and 4 in Singapore, and his work is held in the Kerry Stokes Collection and the BHP Billiton collection.
Since 2021 Nicholas has also minted and curated digital work on the Solana blockchain under the handle @artcons9, curating collections that explore abstraction and photomedia and writing critically about art and artists.In 2023 he presented Frankenheads on Exchange Art, his first digital exhibition of physical works on chain, a series on canvas, board, and paper that treats the figurative head as an abstract image.In 2024, following a diagnosis of a rare bone marrow disease, he began Random Scrubs — Days of Darkness, a body of work on sandpaper and dismantled garden furniture that abstractly references the lightness and darkness of his illness.,The work was installed at SLOT Window Gallery in Sydney alongside an interview with fellow artist Tony Twigg, with viewers noting that the drawings resembled scanned x-rays and the dismantled furniture skeletal remains.
