Australian artist Roger Kemp was born in 1908.


Kemp is best loved for his large tapestries in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. These works capture well the abstracted style for which he was known.


Kemp began painting representationally in the 1930's, with figures and dance, foliage and landscape all featuring in his works. This gradually evolved into a system of motifs he employed within strict guidelines of palette and form in his abstract works.

In the same year as he painted Flower piece, Kemp was invited by Marianne Baillieu to present the inaugural exhibition at her new gallery Realities in Toorak. The show, which included a sequential arrangement of mural-scale abstractions and an opening accompanied by Mozart played by a string quartet (music was very important to the artist), garnered significant attention in the press.


By this time Kemp was well recognised as one of Australia's premier abstract painters, and the survey Roger Kemp: Cycles and directions 1936 - 1975 opened at multiple venues across Melbourne in 1978 to mark the artist's 70th birthday.

Flower piece is an unusual example of Kemp returning to the representational painting and subject matter he had explored in depth in the early years of his career. Indeed the retrospective in 1978 included two early oil on cardboard works of similar dimensions, Flowers and Flowers II, both c.1935-1940, as well as a return to working on card in contemporary works.


As the catalogue for that show notes, 'The intuitive spontaneity of the very earliest works on card returns to Kemp but now enriched by a lifetime's experience, a lifetime's painting.'1


Kemp passed away in 1987.


1. 'Maturity' in Roger Kemp: Cycles and directions 1936 – 1975 exhibition catalogue, The Gallery, Melbourne, 1978, no pagination