Despard Gallery is proud to announce the highly anticipated inaugural solo exhibition The Same As Ever by emerging Tasmanian artist George Kennedy.
16 October – 9 November 2024
Within his new suite of paintings, Kennedy takes us on a tour of the suburbs, including a wander through bushland that sits at its periphery. Each work reflects on the expanding density of suburban housing around Rokeby, where Kennedy lives, and the fragile and often chaotic boundaries where the manmade and nature collide. Kennedy interprets the complexity of these marginal spaces combining painted abstraction and figuration with energetic lines, bold colour and aggregated forms. Depictions of abandoned vehicles and stacks of houses become a metaphor for social precarity, rapid urban development and shrinking natural spaces.
Portrayed as abandoned, possibly stolen, crashed, rusted and vandalised, Kennedy’s vehicles can be seen as a reflection of mortality, like a vanitas motif reminding us of life’s brevity and our pending demise. They can also be perceived as symbolising an adolescent quest for meaning, each rusted car carrying suppressed feelings of defiance, disillusionment and personal abandonment. Created with raw honesty, Kennedy’s paintings speak to everyday existence, tapping into the tenacious and larrikin behaviours that define the Australian psyche. At the heart of Kennedy’s practice is an intuitive approach, his robust aesthetic evoking a sense of unruly transition, where moments of familiarity and structure begin to collapse into states of disruption. Captured within this combination of raw painterly gestures and vivid surfaces is a feeling of urgent spontaneity, Kennedy responding to a world that is never static.
George Kennedy is an emerging artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Kennedy graduated from the School of Arts & Media, University of Tasmania in 2020, going on to hold their first solo exhibition at Devonport Regional Gallery in 2022. Kennedy won the Tasmanian Portrait Prize in 2019, as well as the National Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2020. He has been a finalist in the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2023 and 2022, as well as the TIDAL prize in the same year. Kennedy completed artist residencies at Queenstown in 2021, as well as a two-month long residency on King Island in 2023. Kennedy has participated in numerous group shows since 2020, including at the School House Gallery, Rosny, as well as being invited to participate in the special exhibition Painters On Pots, hosted by Despard Gallery.