2026.03.19 – 2026.04.25
Noel McKenna: five horses in a paddock
“Antenna-tenna” is honored to announce the solo exhibition Noel McKenna: five horses in a paddock.
Duration: 2026.3.19 – 2026.04.25
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Press Release
Noel McKenna first saw a horse when he was about ten years old. It was in a “paddock” on the suburban fringe of West End, Brisbane, where he spent his childhood—a horse tethered to a large tree on an undeveloped piece of land. To see a horse on the edge of the city was unusual. After that, he would often go there after school to pat it. The horse—as an enduring motif—would go on to inhabit his paintings from the very beginning of his career to the present, as if the boy in that memory and that first horse have never ceased their dialogue. Noel’s pictures are so private, so everyday: days are like the animals, buildings, and room interiors that recur in his work—still, peaceful, cyclical, as if time no longer moves forward but lingers, indefinitely, in a moment long past.
“My paintings mostly grow”
Noel says of his process. When the first horse is placed on the canvas, the composition begins to take shape. Details are added sparingly, with restraint—fluid lines and low-saturation tones gradually telling the story of life in Brisbane, as if frozen in a still frame. The trivial moods of the city, within such vast tranquility, become almost palpable; vision sharpens, and they are magnified into the entire fabric of life. Horses stand docile, as if murmuring to themselves; modest houses, sincere and plain, are crossed by the occasional magpie; a tilted, fairy-tale tower holds the stories of the Brisbane river. The sky here is enormous, stretching endlessly, and in the single hour of dusk Noel renders it in the tint of a rose—granting it a gentle privilege. When everything has been added, a portion of the picture is deliberately left negative space—like a long reverberation after a story ends. Things in his world are always held in a kind of distance, sharing an exchange etched long ago into old memory, without need to ask why.
Noel is a quiet observer standing outside the picture, yet the animals within his paintings seem always to be gazing at something beyond it. His respect for animals imbues his everyday observations with an enigmatic quality. The Australian poet David Campbell, in “Hear the Bird of Day,” writes: “What’s matter but a hardening of the light? / And flesh, but the mould of the spirit’s flight?” Between Noel and the creatures and daily life he lives among yet cannot fully grasp, there may exist an unverifiable striving: that to infinitely approach the mundane is to draw near the divine.
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Antenna-Tenna
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