Roger Kemp
Roger Kemp
Concept 5, c1974-6
Roger Kemp (1908-1987)
etching 2/35
50.3 × 101.1 cm platemark (frame: 74 × 124 cm)
signed, titled and editioned to margin
Literature: Kolenberg, Hendrick., Roger Kemp, complete etchings, Art Gallery of NSW, 1991, cat. 83, illustrated page 110 (another example)
Exhibited: Art Gallery of NSW, 31st Jan- 7th Apr 1991
$2,400
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simon@ensemblefineart.com.au
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Kemp spent his last decades exploring the geometry of the circle and the square. The artistic interplay between them evokes the meeting of physical and spiritual and inserts human experience into a universal cosmic order. Kemp sets up a dialectic between the stable and the dynamic, so that the elements rotate and move, displaying a “dancing rhythm”. Kemp constantly used the term ‘breaking the circle’. It is in the broken boundaries of square and circle that the viewer participates in a creative act of reconstruction.
Roger Kemp (OBE) studied at the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Painting. In 1944 he held his first solo show at Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne - at that stage the only gallery that would exhibit modern art. He went on to have more than twenty solo exhibitions, including a major survey exhibition for his seventieth birthday. He also won a number of significant art prizes, including the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1968 and 1970 Between August 2019 and March 2020, a major retrospective was mounted at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) under the title Visionary Modernist.