Jordy Kerwick - Motor Spirit (out of the darkness) nº2, 2025

The first thing the canvas gives you is space — not the crowd of
competing forms and saturated fields that characterises Kerwick’s densest
mythological compositions, but breathing room: a vast, near-white ground of
pale cream that occupies the majority of the picture plane and holds its
silence with the authority of a kept secret. Against this ground, the marks are
few and deliberately placed. In the upper register, a horizontal band of
spray-blue floats across the width of the canvas, tethered at each corner by a
tight red zigzag in oil stick or crayon — a stitch, a signal, a notation that
reads as both folk ornament and electrical charge. Below and to the left, a
long vertical blue stroke descends with the controlled insistence of a plumb
line before bending at the foot into a right angle, grounding itself.
Elsewhere, fine white scratched marks and ghosted pencil lines suggest earlier
passages of drawing that have been partially obscured but not erased, held in
the ground as a kind of undercurrent, as if the canvas is remembering something
the eye is not yet permitted to see.

At the lower right, the painting’s sole figurative event: a creature of
remarkable specificity. Part sea creature, part heraldic beast, it is built
from green triangular scales, a pink speckled underbelly, and a radiating fan
of dark blue and teal spines — the spines of a lionfish or a stegosaurid,
rendered with the flat graphic authority of a children’s encyclopaedia
illustration amplified to mythic scale. The creature faces left, its jaw open
in something between a roar and a call, a single black star visible at the
centre of its eye. Two thin red legs extend below it, jointed and almost
comical, like those of a heraldic supporter stripped of all gravitas. The body
of the creature is dense with Kerwick’s characteristic patterning: dots,
stripes, green-black hatching along the belly, the fins rendered in the deep
teal that runs throughout the upper portions of the canvas. It occupies perhaps
a quarter of the available space, leaving the rest to the pale ground, to the
hovering blue horizon line, to the red zigzag brackets at the edges, to the
ghosted pentimento of earlier working.

What distinguishes this painting from Kerwick’s more chromatic, densely
populated canvases is the radical economy of means. The creature is no less
invented, no less characteristic, than the wolves and cobras and tiger-heads
that populate his busier compositions. But here it is given room: room to
breathe, room to be read, room to carry all the weight of the mythology alone.
The cream ground is not emptiness but presence — an active, light-holding
surface into which the blue spray line and the red zigzags and the layered
pencil work have been deposited over time. At 230 × 207 cm, the scale is
monumental, and the decision to leave so much of it uncrowded takes
compositional nerve. The painting earns its title: something has come out of
the darkness, and it has brought with it exactly as much as it needs.

Motor Spirit (out of
the darkness) nº2 in the Context of Kerwick’s Practice

Jordy Kerwick (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia; lives and works in Albi,
France) began painting in 2016 and within six years had been named the second
most in-demand artist on Artsy globally. His practice is built on a stable of
recurring figures — wolves, tigers, cobras, unicorns, bears, and hybrid
zoomorphic creatures of his own invention — deployed across a visual grammar
drawn from folk art, Palaeolithic cave painting, Matisse’s late cut-outs,
Dubuffet’s rawness, Frankenthaler’s subtlety, and the electrifying colour logic
of the fairground and the comic book. What has kept that practice genuinely
alive across almost a decade of prolific output is Kerwick’s willingness to
test his imagery against radically different compositional propositions: the
dense baroque accumulation of his most complex canvases at one extreme, and the
spare, atmospheric restraint of works such as this at the other.

Motor Spirit (out of the darkness) nº2 belongs to a strand of Kerwick’s
output that is less frequently discussed than the saturated mythological
paintings but that reveals, perhaps more clearly, the depth of his formal
intelligence. Works in this mode share a large, near-empty ground — often cream
or very pale — against which a single creature or a cluster of sparse marks
carries the entire burden of meaning. The gesture is legible in his most
distilled paintings of the early and middle period, before the compositions
became more complex, and it reappears in his mature work as a deliberate
counterpoint: a clearing in the visual forest, a silence between the louder
passages. The vertical blue stroke and the red zigzag brackets have the feel of
territorial markings, of signals left on a surface — graffiti, yes, but
graffiti in the archaeological sense, the mark that says I was here, and
something passed through. The ghost lines of earlier working below the surface
give the painting a palimpsestic depth: what we see is only the most recent
layer of a surface that has been thinking for longer than the finished image
suggests.

His practice has also expanded beyond painting. Kerwick showed Vertical
Plane Me, a Portland Stone sculpture, at Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park in
2022; the bronze Hydra vs Bear (2023) is permanently sited at Yorkshire
Sculpture Park; and by 2025, working in stone, terracotta, found objects and
fake fur, he presented his first major UK museum solo, One to Give. One to Take
Away, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (September 2025 – February 2026). In the same
year he appeared in Myths & Machines at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, among
the most seriously curated exhibition programmes operating in Britain. The
double trajectory — from painter to world-builder in three dimensions, from
crowded mythology to spare, atmospheric image — marks an artist at the full
command of his material.

The Case for Acquiring
This Work for the Black Square Collection

The institutional weight behind Kerwick’s practice is, for a self-taught
painter nine years into his career, extraordinary. His work is held permanently
in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Denver Art Museum, the
ICA Miami, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, AMOCA (the Artistic Museum of
Contemporary Art, Cardiff), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Masahiro Maki and
Yusuke Maezawa Collections in Tokyo, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, the
Allegra Arts Foundation and Coleccion Solo in Madrid, and the Chu Foundation in
Hong Kong. Richard Prince — a collector-artist whose acquisitions have a
documented track record of anticipating wider critical and market recognition —
holds a Kerwick. Each of these is not a trophy acquisition but a considered
institutional position, made by curators and collectors who have examined the
practice on its formal and historical merits.

His gallery network commands the primary market with unusual coherence
for an artist of his relative youth. Vigo Gallery (London) and Vito Schnabel
Gallery (New York and St. Moritz) share primary representation; Carl Kostyal
(London, Stockholm, Milan), WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong), Patricia Low Contemporary
(Venice), and SmithDavidson Gallery (Amsterdam) extend the reach to Asia,
Europe and the Americas. The fair presence this ensemble generates — Art Basel,
Frieze, Independent, Art Miami, EXPO Chicago — ensures that Kerwick’s work is
continuously visible to the broadest tier of serious collectors. The auction
ceiling, established at $277,200 for Le Tigre at Sotheby’s New York in 2022,
has now been contextualised by a wave of institutional acquisitions that give
the market a structural floor it did not have at the time of those first
secondary sales.

Motor Spirit (out of the darkness) nº2 is a work that requires a
particular kind of looking. It does not announce itself through sheer visual
spectacle — that is precisely its argument. It is a painting that rewards the
collector who comes to it with patience: the pale ground accumulates, the
ghosted lines surface and recede, the creature at the lower right declares
itself with increasing force the longer it is held in view. It is also, at 230
× 207 cm, a commanding physical presence — a painting that fills a room not
through density but through the gravitational pull of what it withholds. Within
the Black Square collection, which already holds Looking too closely (2024) by
Kerwick, this work establishes a dialogue with the earlier canvas that
illuminates both: one vibrant, chromatic, maximalist; the other spare,
atmospheric, concentrated. Together they demonstrate the full range of an
artist who is not merely prolific but genuinely capable of surprise.

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Patricia Low Contemporary. Jordy Kerwick artist page.
(Permanent collections: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Denver Art
Museum; ICA Miami; Thyssen-Bornemisza Nacional Museum; AMOCA; Fulton Ryder /
Richard Prince, NYC.)

Ocula. Jordy Kerwick artist profile. (Collections:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Allegra Arts Foundation; Beth De
Woody Collection; Chu Foundation; Denver Art Museum; Yusuke Maezawa Collection;
Masahiro Maki Collection; Yorkshire Sculpture Park.)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park. ‘Jordy Kerwick: One to Give.
One to Take Away.’ Exhibition, The Weston Gallery and outdoors, 27 September
2025 – 22 February 2026.

Artsy Editorial. ‘Jordy Kerwick to present first U.K.
museum solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.’ 17 September 2025.

Ocula. Myths & Machines, Hauser & Wirth
Somerset, 17 May 2025 – 1 February 2026.

Vigo Gallery. Jordy Kerwick artist page. (Artsy ‘second
most in-demand artist worldwide,’ 2022; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum
exhibition; Frieze Sculpture 2022.)

Vito Schnabel Gallery. ‘Jordan Kerwick: Pink sunsets,
cigarettes, 3 regrets and hope to haunt the future.’ Old Santa Monica Post
Office, Los Angeles, May–July 2022. (Compositional description: large
atmospheric grounds punctuated by sparse sprayed lines and figurative
passages.)

MutualArt. Jordy Kerwick biography. (Auction record:
$277,200 for Le Tigre, Sotheby’s New York, 2022.)

Carl Kostyal. ‘Be sure to never get to where you are
going.’ Exhibition, Carl Kostyal Milan, 2024. (Spatial architectonics; dialogue
with Fante Asafo flags; Thyssen-Bornemisza reference.)

Vigo Gallery. ‘Jordy Kerwick: Between Consciousness and
Sleep.’ Exhibition text, Mason’s Yard, London, December 2021. (Palaeolithic
lineage; fairground tradition; influences Matisse, Dubuffet, Frankenthaler,
Motherwell, Twombly.)