Roger Kemp

Good condition. Slight indentation on corners as consistent with medium and age.
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Roger Kemp was one of Australia's greatest abstract painters.  Indeed, in his catalogue raisonné of the artist's etchings, Hendrik Kolenberg claimed that 'few twentieth-century artists have created a convincing visual language as symbolic or compelling as Kemp's.  He took little from the art around him and had no followers, though Leonard French and Jan Senbergs perhaps owe him something.  Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian are perhaps his peers, or Picasso and Léger.  Mark Tobey, or in Australia, Ian Fairweather and Godfrey Miller may have understood his work, but between them there was no contact.  His was a singular, authoritative, revelatory vision, as natural as a heart-beat and as hypnotic as great music – Bach or Beethoven.'1 

The musical analogy is appropriate, given the rich, sonorous, graphic rhythms and colour-tone harmonies of Kemp's painting.  It also hints at the work's appropriateness for cross-media reinterpretation. One of Kemp's last great projects was in fact a suite of three woven tapestries for the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria.  Through the patronage of Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, three paintings from the 1960s – Evolving Forms, Piano Movement and Organising Form were translated by the Victorian Tapestry workshop and placed on permanent display on the Great Hall's great grey west wall.  This set was considered so successful that two further tapestries have since been commissioned as pendants to that original triptych - the present work is the painting on which was based the tapestry Abstract Structure (2007, National Gallery of Victoria).

The mechanism of Kemp's work is quite simply explained.  To use one of the artist's own favourite words, it is 'axiomatic'.  Virtually all of his mature works consist of an arrangement of coloured shapes, variously derived from the circle and the square, connected by an armature or leadlight structure of black lines.  As the forms intersect they create crosses, through which Kemp's signifies the human presence within his abstract, metaphysical universe. 

In the present work we see clearly Kemp's artistic dialectic at work, the to and fro exchange between abstraction and figuration, between the mechanical and the mystical, between the ordered and the inchoate.  And as with the meaning, so with the material. Close-up, the painting is a chaotic collision of colours: grey, white and black, two blues, two reds and brown.  The brushwork appears instinctive and expressive in its urgent splodges, scrubbings and dashes of pigment.  But at three metres viewing distance, the work resolves itself.  Now it appears in its finished state: as a calm, ordered, even mathematically calculated composition, a fitted jigsaw of chromatic and tonal subtleties, a painting of depth and grandeur.

 

1. Hendrik Kolenberg, Roger Kemp: The Complete Etchings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991, p. 13