18/08/2026
ARCHIVE - A Sun In His Head by Australian artist David Keating curated by CHAUFFEUR and presented across two neighboring galleries in collaboration with COMA, Sydney, with both iterations opening on the same night, each gallery being a short walk from each other.
For Keating, the first lines applied anticipate the beginning of how the viewer comprehends imaginary space. This then starts an interplay between soft and hard, internal and external, positive and negative spaces, order and disorder starts to develop.
Simple in both medium and form the exhibition exists as a series of new works on Stonehenge and Waterford papers and on canvas. The content is encoded by a set of geometric rules to be simply seen as enclosed rooms, walls and ceilings – or what Keating describes as “containers” in which, seemingly, are vessels to contain forms that define their contents.
The relationship of the body to architecture is fundamental. Architecture, in a sense, is how the West has “civilized” and ordered space. Our enclosures embody our own ideas of ourselves’. Through architectural anthropomorphism, Keating conveys a fascination with the idea of re-immersing the body and imagination into a language within the binary nature in which our world is encoded.
The new series is primarily concerned with objects that look like how they should, and then, how through their emergence in the drawing they become something else. These objects are in turn defined by their interrelationships with the environment and other objects. In drawing, the implied “meaning” of an object is continuously reborn with new relationships to space, time and their prosaic associations.
David Keating
A Sun In His Head
6 September - 10 October 2019
David Keating
Folded Palms
acrylic and ink on canvas
107 x 137.5 cm
2019
