Richard Ketley

Vernissage: April 27, 6pm – 9pm
Exhibition Dates: April 27 – June 26, 2019

XVA Gallery is pleased to announce Richard Ketley’s first solo exhibition at XVA Gallery Swahili.

‘A language, a culture, a coral blue coastline, a style, a palette – a world that joins up my world – Arab and African. That stretches from the Gulf of Hormuz to Northern Mozambique. A world in which I live and over which I fly – a little too regularly.

The exhibition in paint and pattern is a response to this world, which combines large works on canvas and smaller works on drafting film and photomontage.’

Richard Ketley, 2018

Artist Statement

Painting and drawing is an integral part of my life, and has been since a very early age. At the moment I am interested in formal elements of painting and drawing inspired by the world around me and the many countries I visit, and in finding meaning where others do not – in the fall of light on a sandy building in Riyadh, the chaos of the shacks of Kampala, the crowded taxi parks of Johannesburg. My art is a search for perfection that is not often found in life. I am fortunate enough to travel widely in the Middle East and Africa, but I have not found my Tahiti – a landscape populated with many Venuses and primary colours, instead I find landscape covered in sandy construction sites, tin roofed shacks, humanity sweating as trucks our loaded with voluminous bundles. But within these spaces there is balance and form and structure – all elements that are abstracted in my paintings.