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Lot Essay
A fierce two-headed tiger roars out from Jordy Kerwick’s Untitled (2021), a vibrant large-scale painting that exemplifies the artist’s bold and playful figurative style. Executed in impastoed enamels, its hide—striped with black and burgundy on the legs, coral tones on the body and ivory-white for the twin heads—stands out in gleaming, textural splendour against a clear turquoise backdrop, which shimmers with airbrushed vapours of purple, pink, black and blue. Outlined in white below is another of Kerwick’s signature beasts, the two-headed cobra: like the tiger it sports a feathered headdress, and opens its mouths in a fearsome hiss. Conjuring a sense of fantastical, folkloric cosmology, the animals radiate the raw energy and heartfelt glee Kerwick finds in his medium.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1982, Kerwick only began painting in 2016, upon moving to a village in southern France with his wife and their then six-month-old son. His works—which range from abstraction to floral still-lifes to his trademark depictions of double-faced creatures—have since become hugely sought-after, and have gained him gallery shows and representation across the globe. Consciously unrefined and experimental in his approach, Kerwick values the variety of textures and finishes brought about by playing with different media within a single picture: his process has a hybrid vigour that is embodied in his chimeric animal subjects. He counts Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly among his greatest influences. Inspiration from family life, meanwhile—he now has two young sons—continues to imbue his works with a childlike naïveté and emotive charge, invoking the primitive power of Dubuffet’s Art Brut. Their punkish sensibility also reflects something of Kerwick’s life before his transition to fatherhood, often incorporating references to music, poetry or the city of Los Angeles. The present work resounds with the mythic force of some ancient icon or visionary dream, a living trophy of the artist’s unbridled creative spirit.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1982, Kerwick only began painting in 2016, upon moving to a village in southern France with his wife and their then six-month-old son. His works—which range from abstraction to floral still-lifes to his trademark depictions of double-faced creatures—have since become hugely sought-after, and have gained him gallery shows and representation across the globe. Consciously unrefined and experimental in his approach, Kerwick values the variety of textures and finishes brought about by playing with different media within a single picture: his process has a hybrid vigour that is embodied in his chimeric animal subjects. He counts Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly among his greatest influences. Inspiration from family life, meanwhile—he now has two young sons—continues to imbue his works with a childlike naïveté and emotive charge, invoking the primitive power of Dubuffet’s Art Brut. Their punkish sensibility also reflects something of Kerwick’s life before his transition to fatherhood, often incorporating references to music, poetry or the city of Los Angeles. The present work resounds with the mythic force of some ancient icon or visionary dream, a living trophy of the artist’s unbridled creative spirit.