John Kelly (artist)

[3] There is very little historical record that these cows actually existed although Dobell's camouflage activities at Menangle and Bankstown aerodrome are well documented in the Australian War Memorial and by the photography of Max Dupain.

Whilst studying at the Slade, a work from this series, ‘Two men lifting a cow’ was reproduced in France on the front page of Libération.

This exhibition included internationally recognised artists such as Red Grooms, Nam June Paik, Tony Cragg, and Barry Flanagan.

This surreal sculpture, based on flood imagery from Australia, caused a Parisian sensation and was commented upon in worldwide media including in The Times, "Cows and debris put Paris back on modern art map" (Charles Bremmer, 14 September 1999), Time Magazine, the BBC[6] and almost all the French media.

From 2007-08, Le Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain (MAMAC)[8][9] in France where it was juxtaposed against the work of Alexander Calder and Niki de Saint Phalle.

[11] The Monte Carlo sculpture Festival was to be a turning point in Kelly's imagery for it was here he clashed first with the legal world and then the Arts bureaucracy.

This element was a shape borrowed from a Sidney Nolan painting 'Moonboy' or 'The Boy and the Moon' a seminal 1939 work by Australia's most important 20th century painter.

With this exhibition his three key themes to date (Dobell's cows, the Australia Council logo and Nolan's Moonboy) merged to form an idiosyncratic set of symbols that reference Australian modernist history, critique bureaucratic meddling in the Arts and formed a set of symbols that peculiarly become Kelly's although the references are direct and specific (an example is Nolan's Moonboy metamorphosis into an Alien).

His take on the art world in Cork, where he lives has created debate in the Irish Times, especially when he exposed the selection process at the 'Open' held at the Crawford gallery in 2007.

So Kelly is making a good point in his open letter in shifting attention onto the role of the curatorial selectors in deciding on what we see when we go into a gallery”.

Several articles regarding what Kelly refers to as the "disproportionate representation" of private galleries and the appointment of the chair for Australian Venice Biennale 2019 selection panel again sparked considerable controversy and discussion in the media.

[21][22][23] Aside from his critical writing he is also co-writing a play based on Sir William Dobell's life with the award-winning Scottish playwright Alan Gilmour.

Kelly has recently exhibited at the Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart, Tasmania and also at the Liverpool Street gallery in Sydney.