Patricia Low Venezia is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Melbourne born artist Jordy Kerwick. Titled Sirens of Venice, the exhibition explores Kerwick’s phantasmagoric painterly universe, occupied by predatory beasts and zoomorphic figures. The title of the exhibition nods to the status of Venice as a city situated on water, prone to flooding, and to the mythical creatures from antiquity who menaced the seas. In Greek mythology, sirens were alluring hybrids, half woman, half bird, singing sailors to their doom. Kerwick’s paintings, too, captivate with their vividly colourful, patterned forms. His visions seem to exist in a place built from folklore and fantasy, myth and mania – animated by a sense of play, yet laced with threat. On view is the painting Battle of Venice (all works 2025), featuring pairs of creature-combatants facing off in the centre of the canvas. Their bodies are those of large feathered birds, though they are also reminiscent of galleons, sprouting serpentine or dragon-like heads, sometimes with pairs of gaping jaws – one denoting sustenance, the other menace.

Kerwick’s inspirations include Henri Matisse’s Jazz era, as well as children’s illustrated books, the 1963 stop-motion classic Jason and the Argonauts, and 1970s boudoir photography. Teeming with life and colour, his canvases are a collage of elements, painted in a time- intensive process that involves layering paint on paint – spray, acrylic and oil – to make richly textured surfaces. Kerwick’s earliest paintings were still-lifes, and the show includes an evolution of those early works with Motor Spirit (The Untamed), in which a spread-out rug is a canvas for a collection of patterns, disembodied jaws, and a kind of feathered odalisque. Some of the works on show are painted on plain backgrounds, while others, like Battle of Venice and Sirens of Venice have backgrounds suggestive of sea and landscapes. In the latter, the figure is a kind of canvas/landscape too, composed of varied features and topographies, even animal attributes – creatures from a fantastical pantheon.