Search results
Vernon Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His multi-faceted practice includes works that range from large-scale drawings of his ancestors to hard-hitting text-based works and installations.
Vernon Ah Kee, photo: Joe Ruckli. Although his work strikes its own distinct chord, Vernon Ah Kee is an artist whose artistic forebears – among them Kevin Gilbert, Trevor Nickolls, and Gordon Bennett – have had profound influence on his own practice.
Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.
Ah Kee has exhibited his art at numerous galleries across Australia, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and has also exhibited internationally, most notably representing Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2015 Istanbul Biennial.
Jan 10, 2017 · “The popularised desert art and traditional tropes of Aboriginal art began with a false premise,” says Ah Kee. “All the stories and theories and historical groundings going back to the 1970s that underpin Aboriginal art is all a white construction.”
A face emerges from the schematic, delicate but slashing lines drawn by Ah Kee with charcoal on canvas in ‘Unwritten #9’ 2008. This work is from a small series in which rather than delineating form with carefully drawn lines and shading, the face seems to appear almost by accident from a convergence of lines on a blank background.
People also ask
Who is Vernon Ah Kee?
Who is Ah Kee?
Was Ah Kee a personal artist?
What is 'being human' by Vernon Ah Kee?
Ah Kee has a very diverse art practice, using a broad range of techniques and media such as painting, installation, photography and text-based art. He is particularly renowned for his...
