Out There

John Kelly​

Out There was the artist's second exhibition in the gallery. Comprising four distinct elements of Kelly’s practice, the first floor gallery hosted the fifty-seven paintings he produced during his residency in Antarctica and on board the icebreaker Aurora Australis on its trip to Antarctica in the winter of 2013.

These paintings vividly record life in this daunting white continent. Compositions of icebergs and cold blue floes represent 'plein air' painting in extremis. His experience was eloquently described in a series of blogs he wrote for The Guardian.

In 2014, Kelly was drawn to the Burren, a karst landscape in the west of Ireland. Kelly portrays the swirling layered rock formations of this mythic landscape, one of only five such known topographies.

The Desert Series depicts the unique terrain of central Australia which became the next location of Kelly's focus in 2015. Rich, red hues dominate this desert world, once the seabed of an enormous ocean.

To complete a most intense period of making for this talented multi disciplinarian, a new series of Moo Brew etchings are also on view. They incorporate the image of a kangaroo and the sun with a pastiche of Sidney Nolan's 'Moon Boy', a precursor to his Ned Kelly series.