NGV’s Reko Rennie retrospective asks whether he should be considered Australia’s Keith Haring

Is Reko Rennie Australia’s equal of Keith Haring? Every Rennie, a Melbourne-based Aboriginal artist who celebrates the heritage the Kamilaroi people of northern New South Wales, and Haring, the American pop art work goodemerged out of an metropolis graffiti custom.

Every create a extensively recognisable seen language that has a inserting vitality, sense of authenticity and a pulsating vibrancy. Every are deeply autobiographical artists who created a visual code by way of which to share their personal histories.

Rennie is an interdisciplinary artist who seamlessly strikes between video, printmaking, sculpture, painting and neon art work. With better than 100 works on present, drawn from the artist’s two-decade-long career, that’s the first very important retrospective of his art work.

Rennie possesses the reward of constructing memorable pictures which might be concurrently puzzling, intriguing and entertaining. On stepping into the gallery, you encounter a 1973 Rolls-Royce Corniche embellished with the weird camouflage colours that reoccur all via Rennie’s art work. The bodily car is accompanied by a three-channel video work with a Nick Cave and the Unhealthy Seeds soundtrack.

Beginnings

Although born in Footscray in Melbourne, the artist’s grandmother Julia, who belonged to the Stolen Period throughout the Twenties and was enslaved on a pastoral station, raised him and imparted to him his Kamilaroi heritage. In his youth, Rennie observed {{a photograph}} of a pastoralist and his partner dressed up for Sunday church and seated of their luxurious Rolls-Royce car. On the time, he mirrored on the poverty his grandmother would have expert whereas engaged on a pastoral station.

The markings he made on the auto, which might be layered with a traditional diamond pattern of the Kamilaroi people, declare possession over the auto. Inside it is a {{photograph}} of his grandmother. Throughout the video, with a setting photo voltaic as a backdrop, Rennie drives the auto down grime tracks to his dwelling nation and, in a single factor resembling burnouts, he makes typical sand engravings with the tyres of the auto. The work is poignant, evocative and turns into quickly embedded in your memory.

The piece references an earlier one, with a pink 1973 Holden Monaro. In that video, the auto performs a set of burnouts and doughnuts, the traditional initiation ceremony with Westie drag-racing custom of suburbia into which the artist was born. That’s in distinction with the initiation practices and standard sand engravings of the Kamilaroi people. The video is accompanied with an operatic ranking from Yorta Yorta lady, composer and soprano, Deborah Cheetham, carried out with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. As soon as extra, the video turns right into a haunting and significantly surreal experience.

Street areas

Rennie is an artist who appears to be best when he operates in a public setting.

His early avenue art work, accompanied by break dancing and hip hop, thrives throughout the unintentional lighting of metropolis areas. He loves one of the simplest ways avenue art work can ambush the viewer and make use of strategies that catch and preserve the gaze of the casual passerby. Keith Haring and Howard Arkley have been two of the artists who pointed a way for Rennie to maneuver from the street and onto the gallery wall. Although they could have steered just a few of the formal strategies, Aboriginal custom equipped the content material materials that may consummate the work and gives it a narrative.

When in 2020 there was a commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Lieutenant James Put together dinner’s first landfall at Botany Bay and the HMB Endeavour’s charting of the East Coast of Australia, the Carriageworks in Sydney commissioned Rennie to make a bit for the occasion.

His monumental textual content material work is made up of LED neon lettering held up in an aluminium armature. It measures over two-and-a-half metres in peak and nearly 19 metres in measurement. The simple message, one anchored in a conference of avenue art work, reads: “REMEMBER ME”. Put together dinner’s landing marked the beginning of a way of invasion and dispossession, Rennie’s textual content material affirms an opposition to the invasion and stresses that First Nations people survived. Sovereignty was under no circumstances ceded.

This message has been on the core of a whole lot of Rennie’s art work, for example, throughout the two neon objects, OA Warrior I (pink) and OA Warrior I (blue)every from 2020. They’re based on an 1800s {{photograph}} of a defiant Kamilaroi warrior collectively together with his raised membership. The message is that the OA (Distinctive Aboriginal) will not ever cede sovereignty.

In a rather a lot earlier piece from 2016, that has always been one amongst my favourites in Rennie’s art work, a ten-metre-long banner bears the inscription, “I was always proper right here”. It is product of hand-pressed metallic foil on satin the place he employs the geometric diamond patterning of the Kamilaroi people as a background to the phrases.

The work commemorates all of the Frontier Wars, massacres and oppression suffered by First Nation peoples on this nation and in a number of totally different worldwide areas in a robust means.

Spectacular and fixed

Rennie, who turns 50 this 12 months, exhibited on the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and with the 2016 XIII Bienale de Cuenca in Ecuador and has held fairly just a few exhibitions all through Australia, Asia, the US and Europe.

His star is throughout the ascendancy and he is extensively thought of one amongst Australia’s most distinctive and versatile artists, who’s attracting worldwide acclaim.

Fantastically curated by Myles Russel-Put together dinner as his remaining current on the NGV sooner than he takes up the directorship of ACCA, Rekospective is spectacular in scope, fixed in content material materials nevertheless not repetitive.

Whereas Keith Haring died on the age of 31, I actually really feel Reko Rennie will probably be thought of, on reflection, as an artist in any case as very important as Haring and one amongst rising significance in Australian art work.

REKOSPECTIVE: The Art work of Reko Rennie is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until 27 January 2025. Free admission.