Biography

Madeleine Kelly’s work engages with human encounters with “nature” and elemental forces. Bringing together figuration and abstraction, her practice is a mixture of the cosmic and the material that explores the many, often ineffable, points of contact between people, animals and plants such that the material world is transformed in rich and absorbing fantasy. Her paintings can best be described as visual and tangible emanations of science, myth, and magical realism in literature: poetic and paradoxical yet always grounded in sensory, lived experience. While painting remains core to her practice, it often acquires or expands its significance in its interrelationship with other mediums, such as textiles, glass and so on, in which there is regularly a happy collision between the tactile and the ephemeral.

German-born Madeleine Kelly is an Australian artist of Peruvian, Italian and Irish descent who exhibits nationally and internationally, including the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Australia), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and Tapetenwerk (Leipzig, Germany). In 2023, she exhibited new works in the The National 4, at The AGNSW, curated by Beatrice Gralton. Kelly has held residencies at the Cité internationale des Arts (France), Leipzig International Art Program (Germany), YATOO Korean Nature Artists’ Association and the Paphos Theatre Excavation Site (Cyprus). She has won the Churchie Art Prize and the Sunshine Coast Art Prize. Her curatorial project ‘Birds and Language’ was presented at Wollongong City Gallery and a co-edited online edition of the same theme is published in Unlikely Journal. Kelly majored in Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in 1999, and her practice-led PhD was conferred by the same institution in 2013. Kelly is senior lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.

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