John Kelly (born 1965) is an Australian artist.
Early life
Kelly was born in England in 1965. His family emigrated to Australia later the same year and settled in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine.
In 1985, he earned a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts Painting) from RMIT where he also completed his Masters of Arts in 1995. As a winner of the 1995 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, he travelled to London to study as an Affiliate Student at the Slade School of Art from 1996 to 1997.
Works
Paintings – early works (Dobell's cows) Kelly's interest in Australian history clashed with his idiosyncratic sense of humour and this collision created his early Dobell's Cows series (1992–1996) based on the work of the artist Sir William Dobell. Dobell and his fellow artists were commissioned to camouflage airfields during WWII, and as part of this ruse Dobell made papier-mâché cows and scattered them around airfields to deceive the Japanese pilots – "Said Bill, I think the authorities underestimate the eyesight of the Japanese airmen". There is very little historical record that these cows actually existed although Dobell's camouflage activities at Menangle and Bankstown aerodrome are well documented in the Australian War Memorial and by the photography of Max Dupain.
Dobell's cows were first exhibited at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, in 1993. Whilst studying at the Slade, a work from this series, ‘Two men lifting a cow’ was reproduced in France on the front page of Libération. These early indications that Kelly's work had broader resonance beyond Australia influenced Kelly greatly, and his thoughts for future international projects.
Cow up a Tree and other sculptures
In 1999, Kelly was asked by the City of Paris to exhibit in a sculpture exhibition, "Champs del la Sculpture II", held on the Champs-Élysées to mark the millennium. This exhibition included internationally recognised artists such as Red Grooms, Nam June Paik, Tony Cragg, and Barry Flanagan.
At the famous Coubertin Foundation, just outside Paris, Kelly created his iconic 'Cow up a Tree' sculpture, an 8-metre high, four ton bronze sculpture that reproduces Dobell's camouflage cows upside down, high in the branches of an Australian gum tree. This surreal sculpture, based on flood imagery from Australia, caused a Parisian sensation and was commented upon in worldwide media including in The Times, "Cows and debris put Paris back on modern art map" (Charles Bremmer, 14 September 1999), Time Magazine, the BBC and almost all the French media. This sculpture, one of three in the edition travelled back to Melbourne where it has been on permanent public exhibition as part of Melbourne's Docklands precinct. The second sculpture has been exhibited at The Hague's Sculpture Festival, Glastonbury Festival (2007), where it features in a Kaiser Chief's music video "When the Heat Dies Down". From 2007-08, Le Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain (MAMAC) in France where it was juxtaposed against the work of Alexander Calder and Niki de Saint Phalle.
After the Champs Elysèes exhibition he went on to exhibit another monumental bronze work, "Three Cows in a Pile", at the Monte Carlo Sculpture Festival, La Parade des Animaux, in 2002. Other artists in this exhibition included Alexander Calder, Red Grooms and Keith Haring.
In 2003, "Holy Cow – the art of John Kelly", a half-hour television documentary was aired in Australia. In 2005, "Three Cows in a Pile" was exhibited at Glastonbury Festival and also at the Goodenough College in London's Mecklenburgh Square. This exhibition also raised money for a perennial student bursary and was so successful the college has named room 345, Kelly's old room at the Goodenough Trust as it was in 1996-1997 when he studied at the Slade.
The Logo series
The Monte Carlo sculpture Festival was to be a turning point in Kelly's imagery for it was here he clashed first with the legal world and then the Arts bureaucracy. In accepting the invitation to exhibit in Monte Carlo, Kelly was sued by Arts'd’Australie & Stephane Jacob, a Parisian art dealer, who claimed he was the artist's agent in France. In facing the Parisian court, Kelly sought support from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Embassy. The Embassy refused his request for mediation,