JOHN KELLY

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

John Kelly's investigations of national iconography began with his now familiar paintings of 'Dobell's Cows', the strange, cubic decoys made by the WWII Civil Construction Corps of the Allied Works Council to disguise military installations as pasture land. He has continued to play with the linked notions of artificiality and Australian identity, and in the late 1990s he turned his attention to the racehorse Phar Lap.

In the present work the head, arms and shoulders of a labourer or perhaps a museum preparator have disappeared inside the 'front half' of a hollow horse body. Such human animal connection first appears in the mid 1990s, in a series of works showing men wearing 'Dobell's Cow' masks or headdresses. Here the species join as a surreal singularity. The stance of the back legs is such that man and beast read as a single, monstrous hybrid: a kind of inverted centaur, or a pantomime horse without its back end costume.

At the same time, the tension between reality and artifice is further explored in the painting's background, which is not (as it first appears) a landscape, but an interior setting incorporating a 'painting' of a landscape (or to be utterly precise, a painting of a painting of a landscape). On the righthand edge there is even a sly reference to the artist's celebrated earlier series, black and white stripes signifying 'More fucking cows!'