Alexandra Kennedy

Alexandra is a Lecturer in Painting and Studio Co-ordinator for Art History and Theory. 

See Staff Research for a comprehensive Exhibition and Publication Profile for Alexandra.

Contact: Alexandra Kennedy

My practice is located within a context which engages with the zero gesture in painting, addressing the critical relevancy of painting and its ability to reflect upon and engage with its own histories. Hence it could be described as painting about painting. Making use of the notion of the “holes in space” created by electronic and digital technologies, there is a reworking this concept as an “aesthetic of the void” and draws on the conceptual, procedural and material emphasis of non-objective painting.
Recent work makes reference to non-isotropic space and the principles of reverse or inverse perspective. Such ideas have “a genealogy that stretches back to the early twentieth-century ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov concerning cosmic space as the arena and anti-gravity – or the overcoming of gravity – as the project for artistic activity,” and some years later Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s … “notions concerning ‘planetary feeling’ and ‘tilted space’ as ways of overcoming Euclidean perspective.” There is a negotiation between the idea of space and the experience of space, that is, representations of space (the abstract, conceptual spaces of the architect or cartographer) and the spaces of lived experience, “…which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”. Here, Malevich’s 34 Drawings (published 1920) and other instances of the Russian tradition’s engagment with hyperbolic and four dimensional space in the context of concrete and non-objective painting are invoked.
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1 Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Provisional Painting’, in Art in America, May 2009.

(above, right and below) Works by Alexandra Kennedy:

anisotropy (installation 2010)
solo show, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, NZ. 25th January - 5th March 2011

paricles in space, wall work 
(solo show), Argument vertoningstruimte, Tilburg, Netherlands, 7 – 14th February 2010. Photo credit: Martin Stoop
http://www.argument-tilburg.nl/agenda.html  

 Phi Space drawing, 2010.
Working drawings for wall works

More work can be viewed at www.alxkennedy.com