Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist

Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist is the first major exhibition to chart the development of acclaimed Australian abstract artist Roger Kemp’s career. Best known for his large-scale tapestries that hang in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Great Hall, Kemp is recognised as one of the great inventors in abstract art, striving ‘to make visible the invisible’.

From NGV Australia:

Featuring several never before publicly exhibited works, the exhibition is the most comprehensive retrospective of this artist’s work since his death in 1987. Comprising paintings, prints and sketches, the exhibition explores the artist’s extraordinary career, beginning with his earliest paintings of symbolic landscapes and angular dancing figures, through to his late works, which reveal an artist whose concerns go beyond the physical world.

A unique and enigmatic artist, his interest was not in the overriding traditions of figurative and landscape art, nor the prevailing trends in non-objective art, but rather something much deeper and more metaphysical. In Kemp’s later works – highly resolved paintings of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – the geometric structure heightens the symbolic richness contained within. His works from this period are charged with great emotional energy and are the pinnacle of an artistic and spiritual journey. The NGV is publishing a comprehensive monograph to coincide with the exhibition, which features the artist’s work and new scholarship from Australian experts.