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

“Noel McKenna has an eye for the seemingly banal yet incredibly loaded and poetic moment.” Dan Rule, The Age, 2013

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 Darling Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in 2024.  He has been a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize twice (2021 and 2019), a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize ten times, as well as a finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales eighteen times.

Born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1956, McKenna 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, UK, USA and New Zealand.

Recent exhibitions include Noel McKenna: Landscape – Mapped at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017) and Cats that I Have Known at The Watermill Center, New York (2016).

His work is held in all major state and regional galleries, and important public and corporate collections throughout Australia and overseas. McKenna currently lives and works in Sydney.