“His [Ken Whisson’s] was the body through which the world of his paintings flowed, not only as a sequence of memories, but as impressions, thoughts, glances and ripples of feeling. This is what he sought to form and re-form in each work he made. And as far as Australia-as-subject went, he became increasingly adept at catching it in the process of unfolding seamlessly into other places both real and imagined.” Quentin Sprague, Ken Whisson: Painting & Drawing, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2023, p. 84

Ken Whisson (1927-2022) was a singular artist, known for his unconventional and highly personal style that spanned genres and included explorations of identity, landscape, politics, the natural world and the built environment. He championed spontaneity, describing internal and external worlds based on memory and acute observation, conveying mood and feeling through a unique mix of abstraction and figuration.

​​Born in 1927 in Lilydale outside Melbourne, Ken Whisson studied in Melbourne during World War II. He studied at Swinburne Technical College between 1944 and 1945 and then spent several years unlearning what was taught to him. He received tuition from Danila Vassilieff, who he connected with via his cousin, friend of Joy Hester, Pauline McCarthy; and had direct contact with a seminal generation of Melbourne expressionists including Hester, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, but, in his typically understated manner, maintained that he was “just a lad on the fringe of the group…only 17 or 18 when it broke up.”

In 1977 Ken Whisson moved to Perugia, Italy, where he lived for three and a half decades before returning to Sydney in 2015 where he lived prior to his death in 2022. He was the subject of a major survey exhibition in 2012 entitled Ken Whisson: As If, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. His work has been exhibited in public collections within Australia, as well as at the British Museum, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; and Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan. Whisson’s work is held in all state gallery collections, as well as the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand; and The British Museum, London, UK.