Jenny Keate
Flight of the budgerigar; small paintings of a big place
9 – 20 December 2025
For several years, Jenny Keate has been captivated by a particular strand of contemporary landscape painting – work that presents a concentrated, heightened version of reality, and invites the viewer to engage with the natural world on an emotional level.
Searching for the magic she discovered in work by Australian painters, Jenny enrolled in workshops run by renowned landscape artists Ross Laurie and Idris Murphy, held in Arrernte Country, Central Australia. This part of Australia is home to extreme conditions and unique landscapes, including the amazing geological formations of the East MacDonnell Ranges. These vivid, abstract figurative paintings are the outcome of her time there.
Ultimately, the works in Flight of the budgerigar focus on the aspects of the Central Australian landscape that are the most different from New Zealand: water holes, eucalyptus trees as far as the eye can see, gaps in the ranges with dry rivers running through them, and the sense of the eternal that comes from being in a landscape so little altered over millennia. They are the product of the interplay between the landscape, the painting process, and the artist.
View catalogue (PDF)
Thinking about infinity, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Flight of the budgerigar, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Two blues and a black, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Crow song, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
The observer, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320mm $1250
Where it began, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Elsewhere, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
All the times, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Luminous, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Listening to the landscape - Arltunga, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
A whole lot of not muchness, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Small painting of a big place, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Downriver, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Passenger, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Interior landscape, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Dry, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Dotted landscape, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 320 mm $1250
Road trip to Uluru, 2024, acrylic on birch, 320 x 510mm $1600
Grid, 2025, acrylic on birch, 320 x 505 mm $1600
A time and a place, 2025, acrylic on birch, 425 x 425 mm $1600
Figment, 2025, acrylic on birch, 420 x 420 mm $1600
Road trip to Alice Springs, 2024, acrylic on aluminium, 540 x 1060 mm $3200