REKO RENNIE

The exhibition has its roots in Rennie’s childhood visits to Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, where he encountered the Western art-historical canon but found little that reflected his own identity or community.

Decades later, Rennie returns to these formative encounters through a new series of paintings that brings Renaissance imagery into dialogue with Kamilaroi visual traditions. Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio and Lorenzo de Medici are reimagined through Rennie’s distinctive language of bold colour, pattern and reflective foil, incorporating the Kamilaroi chevron alongside European art-historical references.

Bringing together Indigenous heritage, contemporary urban culture and the visual language of the Renaissance, Renaissance Revolution offers a distinctive and personal perspective on art, identity and representation.

Rennie’s recent retrospective, REKOSPECTIVE: The Art of Reko Rennie, was presented at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in 2024–25, surveying more than 100 works across two decades. His work is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Art Gallery of Western Australia.