George Kennedy

The Same As Ever

Inaugural Solo Exhibition

16 October – 9 November 2024

OPENING EVENT – Friday 18 October from 5:30pm. To be opened by leading contemporary printmaker and painter Raymond Arnold [Artistic Director, PressWEST].

Despard Gallery is proud to host the inaugural solo exhibition by emerging Tasmanian artist George Kennedy

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.

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.

Click here to register your interest for George Kennedy.