Jordy Kerwick - Looking too closely, 2024

At 180 × 200 cm, this painting operates at the scale of confrontation.
The canvas is not a window to look through but a wall to be met: chromatic,
insistent, and unwilling to recede. Against fields of carmine red, cobalt blue,
pale sky and cream — a visual grammar that simultaneously recalls Andean
weaving, the flat decorative planes of Matisse's late cut-outs, and the
geometric pageantry of folk art banners — a cast of zoomorphic characters
commands the space with the authority of myth. To the left, a feather-mantled
raptor-creature stands upright and heraldic, one claw raised in something
between ceremony and threat, its body a dense accumulation of teal,
white-striped feathers and reptilian patterning. To the right, a scaled beast
with the musculature of a large predator and the ornamental markings of
Mesoamerican craft rears forward, its head open-jawed, a dragon-wolf crossbreed
that answers to no zoological category. Between them, lower in the picture
plane, a tiger's face — severed, trophy-like, rendered as icon rather than
wound — holds the centre with absolute stillness. Tropical fronds, themselves
alive with fine crosshatching, complete a stage that has no perspectival depth
and no horizon. Everything is surface. Everything is event.

Kerwick's technique is immediately legible in the handling: acrylic, oil
and spray paint are layered in a sequence that moves between precise flat
passages, thick impastoed zones of pure colour, and the atmospheric gradients
achievable only with aerosol. There is no attempt to reconcile these registers
into a unified painterly voice — the collision between them is the point.
Spray-softened backgrounds read against the hard geometry of the patterned
borders; the dense impasto of the creature forms sits against the thin, almost
graphic, line work that defines their internal markings. The result is a
painting that is visually crowded in the manner of a medieval illumination —
too much information, all of it significant — and yet entirely coherent. The
compositional intelligence that distributes weight across the canvas — creature
left, creature right, icon at centre, fronds overhead — is classical, even
Baroque, in its underlying structure. Kerwick has absorbed the lesson of
Rubens's animal hunts, filtered it through folk art and Instagram, and produced
something completely his own.

The chromatic language is fire and sky: reds range from blood-orange to
pure cadmium to near-black crimson; blues move from the cool pale of northern
light to the density of ultramarine. Interspersed are passages of teal, warm
brown and cream. This is not a palette derived from observation — it is a
palette that belongs to ceremony. One thinks of the Fante Asafo flags from
Ghana, with which Kerwick's paintings were shown in dialogue at Carl Kostyal in
Milan in 2024: the flags' embroidered compositions of figures, animals and
geometric patterns against vivid grounds share with this canvas a sense of
encoded meaning, of visual language operating beneath and beyond its literal
subject matter. The chevron borders that frame the lower half of the
composition function in the same way — as edge, as rhythm, as threshold between
the ordinary world and the world the painting inhabits.

Looking too closely in
the Context of Kerwick's Practice

Jordy Kerwick (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia; lives and works in Albi,
France) is a self-taught painter who began making work in February 2016, when
his wife, the artist Ces McCully, placed a set of paints in front of him. He
had previously worked across music, education, marketing and business. Within
four years he had been hailed by Artsy as the second most in-demand artist
worldwide. The arc from that first set of paints to museum solos and permanent
collections across four continents is, by any measure, extraordinary — and it
is explicable only by the internal coherence of what Kerwick has built: a
visual world so distinctive in its logic that it functions as a culture unto
itself.

That world has consistent inhabitants: wolves, tigers, cobras, bears,
horses, unicorns and hybrid zoomorphic creatures that answer to no zoological
category. It has consistent geography: decorative flat grounds saturated with
pattern, domestic objects elevated to totemic status, fronds and flowers and
geometric fields that could as easily be Palaeolithic cave painting as
Matisse's studio wall. And it has a governing philosophy: the conviction that
painting should access deep ancestral memory — the pre-rational, the
mythological, the genuinely strange — rather than illustrate the present
moment. Kerwick has spoken of wanting to unlearn the conventional constraints
of both adulthood and the art world, and the childlike rendering of his
characters is strategic rather than naive. The flattened perspective, the
absence of illusionism, the thick unreconciled colour — these are decisions
made by an artist who has absorbed Matisse, Dubuffet, Frankenthaler, Motherwell
and Twombly and elected to work against their sophistication rather than within
it.

His non-biographical influences are equally wide: comics, books, film,
science, anthropology and art history all feed a practice that has also, in
recent years, expanded into sculpture. At the 2022 edition of Frieze Sculpture
in Regent's Park, Kerwick showed Vertical Plane Me, a Portland Stone
double-headed unicorn that brought his zoomorphic world into three dimensions.
Bronze followed — Hydra vs Bear (2023) now stands permanently in the landscape
at Yorkshire Sculpture Park — and by 2025 he was working in stone, terracotta,
found objects and fake fur. This trajectory, from painter to multi-media
world-builder, tracks the ambition of an artist who understands that a visual
world, to be convincing, must be inhabitable from multiple directions. The
double-headed animals that recur throughout his practice carry a specific
personal weight: they represent his two sons, Milo and Sonny, whom Kerwick has
described as the imaginative engine behind much of his world-making.

The Case for Acquiring
This Work for the Black Square Collection

Kerwick's permanent collection presence is among the most impressive of
any self-taught painter of his generation. His work is held in the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Denver Art Museum; the ICA
Miami; the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; AMOCA (the Artistic
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cardiff); the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; the
Masahiro Maki Collection and the Yusuke Maezawa Collection in Tokyo; the Beth
Rudin DeWoody Collection (The Bunker Artspace, Florida); the Allegra Arts
Foundation and Coleccion Solo in Madrid; and the Chu Foundation, Hong Kong.
Richard Prince — among the most acute collector-artists of the last
half-century — holds a Kerwick, as does the Fulton Ryder collection. This is
not a list assembled from speculative early acquisition; it is a list that
demonstrates sustained, multi-institutional recognition across geographies and
curatorial traditions.

His gallery network is equally formidable. Primary representation is
shared between Vigo Gallery (London) and Vito Schnabel Gallery (New York and
St. Moritz) — two of the most consequential platforms for market construction
in contemporary painting, each with a track record of introducing artists to
institutional-level collectors. Carl Kostyal (London, Stockholm, Milan), WOAW
Gallery (Hong Kong), Patricia Low Contemporary (Venice) and SmithDavidson
Gallery (Amsterdam) extend the network further. The fair presence this network
commands — Art Basel, Frieze, Independent, EXPO Chicago, Art Miami — means that
Kerwick's work reaches the full spectrum of serious collectors on a continual
basis.

His institutional exhibition history underlines the scale of recognition.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum exhibited nine works by Kerwick in
Madrid — a commitment of singular institutional weight from one of the world's
great encyclopaedic collections. In September 2025, Kerwick opened One to Give.
One to Take Away at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, his first major UK museum solo
exhibition, featuring new sculptures and large-scale paintings created
specifically for the show. In the same season, Kerwick appeared in Myths &
Machines at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (May 2025 – February 2026) — a
placement in one of the art world's most internationally significant gallery
programmes. Earlier solos at Vigo Gallery's Wellington Arch in partnership with
English Heritage, Vito Schnabel Gallery New York and St. Moritz, and WOAW
Gallery Hong Kong complete a biography that is, at this stage in his career,
institution-dense in a way that most artists never achieve.

The auction record provides further context. The record price for a
Kerwick at auction stands at $277,200, achieved for Le Tigre at Sotheby's New
York in 2022 — a figure that established the upper register of primary-market
pricing and confirmed the depth of collector demand. His emergence into the
secondary market tracked closely the earlier trajectory of Robert Nava, with a
cohort of speculative and institutional collectors moving simultaneously,
driving prices upward. That speculative phase has since resolved into something
structurally more stable: the institutional acquisitions that followed have
anchored the market at a level that secondary speculation alone cannot sustain.

At 180 × 200 cm, this canvas belongs to the upper tier of Kerwick's
large-format output — the scale at which his compositional intelligence and
chromatic ambition operate at full force. It is a painting that carries the
full proposition of the practice: the mythological imagination, the flat
decorative logic, the collision between art-historical reference and folk
ancestry, the total refusal of naturalistic convention. For Black Square, it
contributes a voice that is like nothing else in the collection — neither the
psychological interiority of Cudahy or Prempeh, nor the Neo-Romantic mythology
of Mueller, nor the digital overlay of Zuckerman — but something anterior to
all of them: a painting that reaches back to the cave, to the Palaeolithic
impulse to make creatures on a wall, and arrives at the present with complete
conviction.

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