Kelly Pretty

About the artist

Kelly Pretty
Kelly Pretty

Paint

    Statement

     Driven by outside

    forces floating like the dust

    enveloping me

     

    Thematically, Pretty's works reject increasingly rational-legal and fashionable trends (such as politics, historical referencing and critique, and deconstruction) in favour of an exploration of what have become dirty words - spirit, affection, passion, and inspiration. Specifically, her work rejects impersonal abstraction in favour of a multiplicity of pre-personal and super-personal stylistic wanderings of a life. If the affective powers of these images are anything to go by, it is a life that is always coming to know and embrace the very impersonal and inhuman flows of intensity and non-sense characterizing an outside which so much contemporary art functions as a shield or weapon against. Not only a courageous life, but also one that learns against tides of capitalizing cruelty, the powers of affection and sorcery in the inhuman stream of becoming that is a world's life. Such lessons are never learnt anywhere inside. "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2007). Occupying the fringes is a life wary of cages and shackles that lead to the tragedy of becoming "human, all too human" (Nietzsche). Here then are art works that haunt the fringes...

     

     

    I make pictures in honour; they drive themselves, inspired from the everyday, flashing imagery before my eyes, both conscious and unconscious. The books I read; biographies which inspire music that takes me away into a Realm beyond this one.  All of these things coexisting together, forging links that perhaps are at first not seen.  I believe it is possible to link everything and to affect people through images.

     

    Biography

      

    Education:

    2005 MFA

    University of Auckland

    New Zealand

     

     

    1999  Postgraduate Diploma in Secondary Education

    Christchurch College of Education

    New Zealand

    1998 Dip VA

     Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology

    New Zealand

     

    Forthcoming Exhibitions:

    Two Thorns and a Rose

    Ninety Gallery

    Upper Deck

    90 Wellesley Street

    Auckland

    New Zealand


    Collections and Awards:

    2011 Molly Morpeth Canaday Trust, Whakatane, NZ.  Merit Award

    2010  Royal Academy Summer Show, London, UK.  Short listed

    2010  Waikato Contemporary Art Award, New Zealand, finalist

    2009  Presenting the Top 100, London,UK, finalist

    2007  Creekside Open, London, UK, Selected by Victoria Miro, finialist

     

    Work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and the United States.

    Publications:

    Open Vernissage 2009

    Drawing with Dolphins, 2009

    The Marmite Prize 2008

    Encountering an Outsider, the Art of Kelly Pretty, 2008

    None on One, 2007

    Exhibition History

    2011  Molly Morpeth Canaday Trust Art Award. Merit winner, New Zealand
    2010  ING Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
    2010  Bold Horizon Waikato Art Award, Waikato Museum, New Zealand
    2010  Special Project, ICA, London
    2010  Special Project, Prado Museum, Madrid
    2010  Special Project, Regina Sophia, Madrid
    2010  Special Project, Tate Modern London
    2009  Xmas Market, Yinka Shonibare Project Space, London
    2009  Mini Print Exhibtion, Artlink, Hull
    2009  One Night Stand. The Flea Pit Columbia Road, London.
    2009  Pretty Please, Vision and Gold, Mile End Ecology Centre, London
    2009  Gallery Vernissage, Osijek, Croatia
    2009  Exquisite Decay, Désintégration Exquise,Chateau d'Alba La Romaine, Alba la Romaine, France
    2009  Presenting the Top 100, finalist, Jealous Gallery, London
    2009  Fowle Hall Features 3, Kent, England
    2009  Presenting the top 100. Round one, London
    2009  Drawing with Dolphins, Crimestown Gallery, London
    2008  TOP100, MCPS PRS, London
    2008  The Big Day, Fieldworks collective, London
    2008  Final Fling, Vyner Street, London
    2008  The Painting Room, Transition Gallery, London
    2008  When Things Come together, Nowhere North Gallery, London
    2007  Over Subscribed, Lorum Ipsum Gallery, Vyner St, London
    2007  Nuestra Frida( Our Frida), Grupo Soap del Corazon, Minneapolis, USA
    2007  My Penguin, 39 Gallery, London
    2007  1000 Suns, Nowhere North Gallery, London
    2007  Creekside Open, selector, Victoria Miro, APT Gallery, London
    2007  Prime, Nowhere North Gallery, London
    2006  Little Lyca, Foundry, London
    2006  London Drawing Biennale, Foundry, London
    2006  Taking the Sunday out of Watercolours, Foundry, London
    2005  Masters Exhibtion, Auckalnd University, New Zealand
    2005  Welcome to the Realm of the Redheads, Alleluia, Auckland, New Zealand
    2004  Iko Iko, Auckland, New Zealand