Repetition

An exhibition that brings together work by Richard Killeen spanning four decades (1974–2020) around a single connecting theme: repeated images.

Starting out at Elam School of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Colin McCahon, Killeen has had a rich and varied career. Encompassing painting, print-making and digital works, Killeen’s practice defies narrow categorisation.

At the core, however, is a continued attempt to “seize and reposition the optical universe bit by bit.” (Neil Talbot, 2020). Time and again, Killen lifts images from the everyday and repositions them in ever-evolving compositions, creating new relationships and visual hierarchies.

In the exhibition catalogue, Laurence Simmons writes, “The images ‘appropriated’ by Killeen in his work, lifted originally from public compendia of images — resource books, collections, manuals, encyclopaedias — are repeated, and in that repetition their whole effect is transformed, dismantled, decomposed.”