Vigo Gallery is delighted to present A Dream About a Horse, a group exhibition of new paintings by James Drinkwater, Jordy Kerwick, and Jenny Watson.
A Dream About a Horse brings together three established Australian artists all of whom have delved into their subconscious to mine equine imagery in a primal unfettered way, taking snippets of memory and fantasy relating to childhood to inspire very different works.
Drinkwater’s inspiration for his painting ‘Somewhere Between The Sea and The Table’ derives from time spent on the beach with his wife and children. He is from a working-class town called Newcastle surrounded by remarkably beautiful beaches with rolling waves, beautiful sand, and magical light. Growing up many of his friends’ parents trained horses which they would bring down to the beach for exercise and relaxation. In regional coastal Australia, bringing your horse down to the sand/water is still a big part of what it is to give a horse its mental nourishment and Drinkwater sees such natural beauty in this imagery. For him it’s about watching the horses luxuriate in the water and roll in the sand as he experiences family time on the beach. Many families also fish for their supper and it often happens that if you don’t catch your fish supper from the sea, you get your prawns, oysters or whatever on the way home from the fishmonger which you cook over a fire. ‘(In my paintings) I’m playing with the hazey memory of a beautiful long summer day by the sea, with horses frolicking and children playing. At the end of the day you don’t really know what happened but you roll into bed full, happy, hot - Somewhere Between the Sea and the Table.’
Like Drinkwater, Kerwick’s work has strong links to family and childish pursuits. His spontaneous, raw, colour saturated paintings are playful in style, redolent of the exuberance and carefree qualities of childlike creativity and mark-making. Quasi-mythic in content, they depict dramatic scenes populated by strange, fictive, creatures. Wolves, unicorns, cobras, bears, horses, and animalistic quasi humans are scrambled into hybrid beasts that roam the canvases. They are often depicted double-headed, a loving nod to Kerwick's two young sons Sonny and Milo. Merging these mythical creatures with human forms, flowers and landscapes, Kerwick challenges the normal constraints of both adulthood and the art world, celebrating the theatre of the domestic. Family and a love of paint and painting are his driving force, the former informing nearly everything he does.
‘The double heads all started when I was playing around with my sons, drawing stuff. A lot of my work comes out of trying to draw cool stuff for my sons and trying to stay young in the process. Three and four-year olds aren’t that interested in flowers, but if you draw a snake, a cobra or a tiger, then, whoa! Now we’re talking! So, I’d be drawing one scary creature for one of my sons and then the other one would want one too. That kept on going for a while, which was fine, and then at one point I just couldn’t be bothered so I just put two heads on this drawing of a cobra and said to them, that’s you, and that’s your brother. Sunny’s always on the right, and Milo’s the left.’
A Unicorn being mounted by a multi headed Tiger is a recurrent motif in Kerwick’s oeuvre referencing Stubbs’s Lion and Horse series. The sculpture Time Versus Place in this exhibition shows a prancing Unicorn attacked by a grimacing triple headed mountain cat. His paintings often include Unicorns as they are especially loved by his younger son. The drawing on canvas that accompanies it is an idea for a much larger work of epic proportions, a dream about a horse. Not Quite Pierre Not Quite Henri 2023 is a Rousseauesque fantasy with unicorn and dragon fetish heads protecting two glamazon muses who are surrounded by the danger of the Time Thief and a Bearsnake threatening their otherwise joyous sanctuary.
Jenny Watson has had a distinguished career marked by her unique narrative and autobiographical approach to painting. She first gained prominence in the 1970s and is known for her distinctive and original use of materials, such as horsehair and fabric and her exploration of personal themes, often incorporating elements of feminism, identity and childhood memory. Horses have been a part of her life since she was a teenager. She got involved in dressage in the 1980s when her work changed dramatically moving on from a realist painting style and beginning to work in her distinctive naïve, childlike manner.
‘I like to pull something up from memory. So that might be myself as an eleven year old, or an older relative on a walking frame, or it might be a horse that was very special to me. I deliberately mine my personal past to get imagery that I hope will resonate with other people. And it seems to. But I think as an artist being able to express that is probably pretty special. However, I don’t think the process is particularly special. I think every human being on the planet has those moments of poignancy.’
The show will open with a Private View on Friday 26 January, Australia Day, 6 - 8pm. For more details please contact anna@vigogallery.com.
Jordy Kerwick (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia) lives and works in Albi, France. He is self-taught, having taken up painting in 2016, and has exhibited extensively internationally. An exhibition of Kerwick’s work is currently on display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. Kerwick’s paintings and sculptures are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid; Allegra Arts Foundation, Madrid; Chu Foundation 譽婷堂, Hong Kong; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Masahiro Maki Collection, Tokyo; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire; Beth De Woody Collection, New York.
James Drinkwater is a painter and sculptor based in Newcastle, Australia. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney (2001) and has held 30 solo exhibitions since 2004. Major surveys of his work have been held at Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle; the NCCA, Darwin; The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University. Drinkwater has also collaborated with iconic fashion houses, choreographers, and composers to produce capsule collections, costumes and sets. He has produced commissions for Monash University and Multi Arts Pavilion, MIMA Lake Macquarie. He has been awarded the Marten Bequest Scholarship (2011), the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship (2014), the John Olsen National Art School Life Drawing Prize (2002) and has been a finalist in many prizes including the Wynne Prize three times, Sulman Prize and the Dobell Drawing Prize.
Jenny Watson (b. 1951, Melbourne, Australia) is a leading Australian artist whose conceptual painting practice spans more than four decades. Solo exhibitions of Jenny’s work have taken place at museums and public institutions across the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Heide Musuem of Modern Art, Melbourne; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama; Marburger University Museum, Marburger; Ulmer Museum, Ulm; Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne; and the Saatchi Gallery, London. Jenny’s work has featured in group exhibitions held at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney; University of Queensland Art Museum, Queensland; Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Berlin; TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria; Kelowna Museum, British Columbia; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongaarewa, Wellington; Waikato Museum of Art & History, Hamilton; City Gallery, Melbourne; Kunstmuseum & Kunsthaus, Hamburg; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Jenny also represented Australia at the 1993 Venice Biennale with her exhibition, Paintings with Veils and False Tails.
