Roger Kemp

See current Melbourne Art Fair offsite exhibition

I take all my work down to one entity, one unit that becomes equal to what one octave is in music. What it is possible for a composer to get out of an octave, I can get out of these units, these symbols of mine. I use the principal of the fugue. Bach’s music is a close parallel, in that he can get his symbols down to such mechanical perfection and at the same time maximum emotion comes out. The same principal runs through all the arts. Roger Kemp, Australian, 1982

Universal in its ambitions, yet individual in its resolution, the art of Roger Kemp was integral to his effort to make sense of the world, the outward sign of a solitary quest for enlightenment. It could appear quirky and obsessively idiosyncratic, but the nature of the painters experience did not preclude the graceful, the lucid, the uncannily profound. There are moments of poignancy in his oeuvre, moments of blunt greatness, of depth of feeling. Christopher Heathcote

Kemp embodied to successive generations the very idea of what it was to be an artist. It was a calling, not a career. Patrick McCaughey

VIEW AWARDS AND REPRESENTATION

ROGER KEMP 1908 – 1987

STUDIES

1933 – 35 National Gallery School of Art, Victoria

AWARDS

1944 Bendigo Art Prize

1956 Olympic Games Memorial Arts Festival Bronze Medal

1961 John McCaughey Memorial Prize

1964 Darcy Morris Prize; Albury prize

1965 Georges Art Prize; Transfield Prize

1968 Blake Prize; International Cooperation Art Award

1970 Blake Prize

1973 Distinguished Artists & Scholars Award, Visual Arts Board Australian Council

1977 OBE; Silver Jubilee Medal

1984 Hon. Doctorate of Law Monash University

1986 Painters and Sculptors Award for outstanding contribution to Australian Art

1987 AO for services to the Arts

SELECTED COMMISSIONS

National Gallery of Victoria – Suite of Six Tapestries (The Great Hall)

Monash University – Tapestry (Blackwood Hall)

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019 – 2020 Roger Kemp, Visionary Modernist, National Gallery, Victoria

2015 Eastgate & Holst Gallery, Melbourne

2010 Australian Club, Melbourne

1993 McClelland Gallery ‘Roger Kemp Early Works’

1991 Roger Kemp ‘The Complete Etchings’ Art Gallery of NSW – then on National Tour

1986 National Gallery of Victoria Spoleto Festival ‘Roger Kemp Sacred Images’

1978 -1980 National Gallery of Victoria ‘Cycles and Directions’ with concurrent exhibitions held at Monash University Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, Realities and Melbourne University Gallery. This exhibition then travelled to several Victorian Regional galleries and finally in 1980 to the Art Gallery of New South Wales

1975 University of Melbourne Art Gallery

1973 Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery

1971 Commonwealth Art Gallery London

SELECTED RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2015 ‘Triumph of Modernism’ TarraWarra Gallery

2013 – 2014 ‘Vibrant Matter’ TarraWarra Gallery

2011 ‘OUT OF AUSTRALIA Prints and Drawings’ British Museum

2010 ‘Sight & Sound Music and Abstraction in Australian Art’ The Art Centre Melbourne

2009 ‘Cubism & Australia Art’ Heide Museum of Art Victoria

2009 ‘Creative Australia and the Ballet Russes’ The Art Centre Melbourne, Victoria Regional Tour

2009 ‘A Partial View’ The University of WA Art Collection

1998 ‘Seeing Cezanne: Australian Affinities’ The Art Gallery of NSW