Roger kemp artist biography

Roger Kemp, painter and etcher, was born in July 1908 in Bendigo, Victoria, second child of Frank Kemp, who worked at a nearby gold mine, and his mother Rebecca Kemp (née Harvey). The family relocated to the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra in 1913 after Roger Kemp’s father was seriously injured in a mining accident.

In 1929, Roger Kemp enrolled in drawing classes at the National Gallery Art School where he studied alongside fellow artists including John Vickery and Noel Counihan. During 1930-32 he attended the School’s night classes and in 1932 he enrolled in the Working Men’s College (now RMIT). Roger Kemp returned to the National Gallery School in 1933 where he studied for the next three years accompanied by students such as Clifford Bayliss, Nancy Grant and Ian MacFarlane. At the same time, Roger Kemp was largely self-taught, developing his own innovative artistic vision and becoming one of the key figures of abstract art in Australia.

Kemp’s early works of the 1930s were small in scale, figural, reflected the influence of Cézanne and were inspired by the idea of analogy between art and music. His later works drew upon both geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism and were thus composed of considered lines creating geometric shapes as well as expressive, impulsive brushstrokes. After an extended period of time working away from the public eye, Kemp held his first solo exhibition in 1945 at Velasquez Galleries, Melbourne. By the late 1940s his works had grown in size and abstraction. Squares and circles appeared as recurring motifs, often fragmented across a shallow picture plane.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Roger Kemp worked in factories to support himself and his wife Merle Kemp. His profile soon rose when in the 1960s he won the John McCaughey Memorial Prize (1961) and the Blake Prize for Religious Art (1968 and also in 1970). In 1966 he embarked on his first trip overseas at the age of 58 and travelled extensively throughout Europe. From th

Australian artist

For the English railway mechanical engineer, see Roger Kemp (engineer).

Francis Roderick Kemp AO, OBE, (Eaglehawk, 3 July 1908 – Melbourne 14 September 1987), known as Roger, was one of Australia's foremost practitioners of transcendental abstraction. Kemp developed a system of symbols and motifs which were deployed to develop a method of manifesting creativity at a fundamental level, striving in particular to explain humanities place in a universal order.

Youth

Francis Roderick Kemp was born on 3 July 1908, in California Gully, Eaglehawk. His father, Frank Kemp, worked at a gold mine, and his mother, Rebecca Kemp, raised the family. Both the Kemps and Harveys were devout Methodists and proud Cornish people. In 1913 the family moved to Melbourne after a mining accident. In late February 1920 Roger's father was struck by a tram and was pronounced dead on arrival when Roger was 12 years old.

Work

At twenty-one Kemp took his first formal steps to becoming an artist by taking classes in drawing at the National Gallery Art School stationed next to the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1932 Kemp enrolled into the Working Men's College, briefly studying commercial art before returning to the National Gallery Art School for classes in painting from 1933 to 1935.

Although he sold no works, Kemp's first solo exhibition at the Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne in June 1945 drew interest. He went on to win the McCaughey Prize in 1961, the Georges Invitation art prize and the Transfield Art Prize in 1965 and the Blake Prize in 1968 and 1970.

Roger Kemp was an Australian painter who was born in 1908. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG) have featured Roger Kemp's work in the past.Roger Kemp's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 206 USD to 107,825 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 2001 the record price for this artist at auction is 107,825 USD for ABSTRACT STRUCTURE, sold at Sotheby's Sydney in 2008. In the past 12 months, their artworks have averaged 3,914 USD.Roger Kemp has been featured in articles for Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and Artist Profile. The most recent article is Spiritual Joseph Beuys Plus More: September Diary – Revd Jonathan Evens written for ArtLyst in September 2022. The artist died in 1987.

After completing three years of study at the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Painting, Roger Kemp remained aloof from the art world for a decade, troubled by the vitriolic reaction of conservative creative circles to the new concepts of abstraction and artistic experiment.  His paintings from this time were smaller scale and landscape and figure based, before becoming more abstracted and symbolic, inspired by modern music and dance.  In 1944 he held his first solo show at Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne - at that stage the only gallery that would exhibit modern art.  An exceptionally high number of inclusions in major group shows through the 1950s established Kemp's name among the great modern Australian painters.  During this time, painting in enamel on masonite, his work moved towards  non-objective abstraction, whilst tying in symbolic uses of colour and composition.  In 1970, at age 62 - his reputation at its height - the Kemp family moved to London.  There he produced a major series of small scale pastel and ink drawings, and shared a studio with Bridget Riley and Peter Upward where he began painting on paper on a large scale, employing the 'all-over' composition he is best known for today.  Kemp remained an active, productive and respected artist and teacher in Melbourne until his death in 1987, being awarded an OBE and installing four monumental tapestries of his paintings in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, where they remain today below Leonard French's stained glass ceiling.

Major Publications:
David Hurlston, et. al. Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist, retrospective exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, 2019
Christopher Heathcote, A Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2007
Hendrik Kohlenberg, Roger Kemp - the complete etchings, Art Gallery of NSW, 1991

MeMo Review - Roger Kemp: A Seleciton of Etchings from The Estate, 2021

Alwynne Mackie. R