Born Brisbane, 1956, lives and works in Sydney.

Noel McKenna’s ‘unstudied’ looking, spare, almost nonchalant paintings are most frequently rendered with an apparently simple directness, onto small framed and glazed plywood panels (and occasionally ceramic tiles or larger, conventional canvases). McKenna’s long-term fascination with the most ordinary of daily details; domesticated animals, lost pet posters, vernacular construction techniques (Queenslander houses on stilts or suburban Melbourne for example), the number and location of public toilets or other municipal utilities and specifics, transform his work beyond any restriction of nostalgia or the confines of cultural specificity, towards a common and important reading of universal liminality. McKenna’s observational choices may come from the normal, the ordinary everyday – the “super-normal” as he describes it – but they come out the other side as extraordinary, metaphysical, unconcealed. His work simultaneously retains the sophistication and knowingness of the highly trained professional artist, yet inherently articulates the innocence, urgency and necessity of the self-taught.

Almost a national institution in his own right, McKenna has staged numerous solo exhibitions throughout Australia and New Zealand over the last 30 years and is regularly listed in the Australia Art Collector’s ‘50 Most Collectable Artists’. Selected Solo Exhibitions include: The Pot (my life is clay), Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2025); to wink at the cat, mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2024); Snow is dead, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (2023); Thoughts covered in moss, Francois Ghebaly, New York (2023); Landscape–Mapped, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017); Cats That I Have Known, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Centre, Long Island (2016).

Selected awards and prizes include: Darling Portrait Prize, awarded by the National Portrait Gallery (2024); Trustees’ Prize for Watercolour, awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2021); Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Prize (JADA), New South Wales’ collection of contemporary drawing (2020).