JORDAN KERWICK

Kerwick’s inspirations include Henri Matisse’s Jazz era, as well as children’s illustrated books, the 1963 stop-motion classic Jason and the Argonauts, and 1970s boudoir photography. Teeming with life and colour, his canvases are a collage of elements, painted in a time- intensive process that involves layering paint on paint – spray, acrylic and oil – to make richly textured surfaces. Kerwick’s earliest paintings were still-lifes, and the show includes an evolution of those early works with Motor Spirit (The Untamed), in which a spread-out rug is a canvas for a collection of patterns, disembodied jaws, and a kind of feathered odalisque. Some of the works on show are painted on plain backgrounds, while others, like Battle of Venice and Sirens of Venice have backgrounds suggestive of sea and landscapes. In the latter, the figure is a kind of canvas/landscape too, composed of varied features and topographies, even animal attributes – creatures from a fantastical pantheon.

Jordy Kerwick (b. Melbourne, Australia, 1982) is an artist based in Gaillac, France. Self-taught, Kerwick took up painting in 2016 after working in music. His richly layered paintings and strongly defined visual language quickly came to the attention of galleries and collectors, and his work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) and Museo Thyssen in Madrid (Spain), as well as in group shows at institutions including LACMA (US) and the Jewish Museum of Australia. Kerwick’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA, the ICA Miami, Florida, USA, and Fulton Ryder (Richard Prince), among others.