Jordy Kerwick: Tiger Tiger Burning Bright
Australian painter Jordy Kerwick has burst onto the international contemporary art scene with a ferocious style and a light-hearted touch.
Image credit: Jordy Kerwick, Untitled, 2022, oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy the artist, PIERMARQ*, Sydney and Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York © Jordy Kerwick
Imagine an emerging painter that no one saw coming (no one except a couple of savvy gallerists and a hoard of Instagram followers). He bursts onto the scene with a devil-may-care attitude, naïve style and big-ticket secondary sales. This is a tried-and-true story of the contemporary art market, most recently embodied by Jordy Kerwick, an Australian artist based in the south of France whose brazen paintings have rocketed to global recognition.
His works are a heady mix of loose graffiti marks and flat, fantastical characters that reappear across many canvases, playing
out scenes that are part tattoo parlour,
part children’s adventure.
The raw energy of Kerwick’s practice
is a tap unfastened, seemingly achieving half a career’s worth of work in the six years since he started painting. Since 2016,
he has realised 20 solo exhibitions in seven different countries, including France,
Hong Kong, Japan, the UK and the US. In that time, Kerwick has thrashed out a style that is arresting and recognisable, fashioning his own myths out of feather-trimmed snakes and double-headed beasts that hang like prize pelts on the wall.
Kerwick’s works only hit the secondary market in 2022, but they have already caught international attention. Le Tigre (2022), the opening lot in Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction in New York, sold for US$277,200, smashing its estimate of US$25,000–35,000. Of a feather with Robert Nava and Szabolcs Bozó, Kerwick deftly articulates the aesthetics of counterculture to joyful and widespread effect.
Kerwick’s Australian-based gallerists Justin Callanan and Rob Russell of PIERMARQ* represent the artist alongside Vito Schnabel Gallery,
New York, Vigo Gallery, London and ...Subscribe to read this article in full
