Kim Carpenter AM (Production, 1969) is a multi-award-winning artist and theatre-maker. His NEW YORK exhibition is a nostalgic celebration of his favourite city with images drawn from his many visits from 1979 to October 2024 for his theatre productions and personal pleasure.
From Theatre to Art
I am a visual storyteller who has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the performing arts. After graduating from NIDA at 19 I commenced a career as a set and costume designer and moved into directing works for major performing arts organisations before founding my own company – Theatre of Image – primarily dedicated to family audiences.
After 50 years as a collaborative theatre artist I am now forging a successful career as a solo artist pursuing my own visions and stories in art galleries and collections.
My New York paintings are full of wit, energy and colour. The works have been created in mixed media: paint, ink, crayon, collage and a subversive collection of objects (comb, keys, miniature model chairs, cigarette packets, pill packets…) collected since my first trip in 1979.
Each painting has a personal story attached to it that makes the exhibition a catalyst for everyone who has ever visited New York City to share their own memories and stories.
Background to The NEW YORK Show
Having been to New York eight times over four and a half decades for work (Theatre of Image) and pleasure, I returned from last year’s trip to open up my box of visual diaries that I had kept over that period. These illuminating diaries have become the springboard for this exhibition.
The diaries, full of sketches and notes, bring back indelible memories that reflect the changes in the people and the place.
I have steeped myself in a New York state of mind since returning home from the recent trip last year.
It’s been such a pleasure to open my box of visual diaries and rediscover what I had recorded and to remember the different times and circumstances of each visit compared to the 2024 trip.
Overall, my inspiration for these new pictures has been driven by the timelessness, energy, positivity, vitality, power, intensity and diversity of the place and its people – a melting pot of fascinating people and stories.
All these qualities have fed my imagination – but above all I realised it’s the people that I found most interesting to look at.
So, as a result, each picture tells of a personal observation or engagement with native New York characters in the context of their lives in a bustling world of canyons of pencil-thin skyscrapers, the smells emanating from the melting pot of cuisines, the cultural institutions, the fascinating people (from rich to poor) to the sanctuary of Central Park.
I miss it all but am happy to be creating an homage to New York City.
As long as I immerse myself in creating the pictures I feel I am metaphysically still in New York City.
“His core natural gift is his drawing and painting underpinned by highly individual vision of the world.”
“There is a wonderful kind of youthful, fresh spontaneity about Kim’s art. It is fresh and fruity – and honest.”
– Edmund Capon OBE AC (late Director of The Art Gallery of NSW), Australian Financial Review.
Kim’s favourite professional and personal times in New York
The Book of Everything – a co-production between Theatre of Image and Belvoir in 2012. The show enjoyed a successful season in The New Victory Theatre on 42nd Street, Broadway. Voted by critics as one the 10 best Broadway shows that year.
As an assistant to international visual director, Robert Wilson, on Medea which was rehearsed in Harlem (before it became gentrified) on a Creative Australia scholarship.
Personal experiences include indelible memories of New York family rituals of Thanksgiving and Christmas. But more so the interaction and incidents that engaged me daily – from Uptown to Downtown.
NIDA’s Influence
I was 17-18 when I trained at NIDA.
The experience remains an indelible memory which was both tough and exhilarating. NIDA gave me the freedom and opportunity to discover and develop my own distinctive vision of the world. The evidence of that was found in my NIDA graduation play, A Spurt Of Blood, by French surrealist Antonin Artaud.
I directed and designed it being unaware I was creating a piece of visual theatre which became the benchmark for me eventually decades later founding my own company, Theatre of Image.
For 30 years Theatre of Image filled a gap in the Australian theatre landscape as a mainstage theatre company for multi-generational/family audiences.
Collaborations were with major infrastructure companies including Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir, Opera Australia, Sydney Symphony Orchestra combined with multiple tours to Canada, North and South America, Tokyo and national tours.
In 2019 I decided to close Theatre of Image and return to my solo art practice exhibiting in galleries and now represented in private and public collections.
However, most people observe that a theatrical storytelling remains in my artwork.
The Future
I believe that, if you are lucky enough to be born with an artistic gift, you are driven by the responsibility of fully using it until you can’t.
The NEW YORK Show runs from 14-29 June at Maunsell Wickes Galleries (formerly The Barry Stern Galleries) Sydney oldest successful art gallery at The Intersection – Paddington’s upmarket Fashion District.