McKenna’s works “depict the noble poetry of the everyday.” Glenn Barkley

“Noel McKenna has an eye for the seemingly banal yet incredibly loaded and poetic moment.” Dan Rule

Noel McKenna works in a variety of media, including oil, enamel and watercolour, lithography and etching, ceramic and metal. He produces offbeat depictions of everyday scenes, often including displaced objects, people and animals. His spare canvases hint at narratives beyond the picture plane, often movingly depicting the relationship between humans and animals.

Noel McKenna won the 2015 Tattersall’s Club Landscape Art Prize and was a finalist in the 2016, 2015 & 2014 Sir John Sulman Prizes, as well as a finalist in the 2014 Wynne Prize. McKenna won the Sir John Sulman Prize in 1994 and has been awarded the Trustees Watercolour Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales five times since 1997. He has also won the Melbourne Savage Club Prize for Painting and the Mosman Prize. Noel McKenna exhibited at Art Basel, Miami with Mothers Tankstation in 2015 and with the private gallery Ten Cubed, Melbourne in 2016. Noel McKenna completed a residency at The Watermill Center, Watermill, NY, USA in 2016 which culminated in the exhibition Cats that I have known.

Born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1956, Noel studied architecture at Queensland University in 1974 and 1975. He continued his education at Brisbane College of Art from 1976 to 1978 and then at Alexander Mackie College, Sydney in 1981. Since then he has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas, holding solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart, as well as Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Ireland and New Zealand. His work is held in all major state and regional galleries, and important public and corporate collections throughout Australia and overseas. Noel McKenna currently lives and works in Sydney.

[ To view Noel McKenna's CV click here ]