Profile
Francis Kenney (b.1976) is a British Fine Artist and Graphic Designer.
Francis has worked for twenty years as an award-winning communication designer, type designer and art director based in London. He studied fine art at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, The University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and Central St. Martins in the 1990’s. He has work held in the permanent collections of the V&A in London, Tallinn University in Estonia, and has exhibited internationally.
Love, Art, Life and Death: Francis riffs on the everyday. The subject matter is the meaning and interpretation of images, symbols and language. Objects and scenes create a narrative with the audience using humour or gentle aphorism to reposition the ordinary as extraordinary and question how we each relate to our world.
Working across printmaking, painting, sculpture and digital media, he makes art that talks about relationships and the human experience by recognising joy in the mundane and reminding the viewer that, to misquote Jim Reeves, “now is all the time there may be”.
His recent works are modern interpretations of symbolic vanitas and memento mori pictures that became popular in the seventeenth century, serving to remind the viewer of their mortality in a religious age when almost everyone believed that life on earth was merely a preparation for the afterlife. Adopting a bright colour palette, to emphasise humour in the face of death, they consider why we are here, at a time when we are at risk of being consumed by the trivial.
SELECTED EXHIBITS
Kobe Fashion Museum - Japan.
University of Alberta - Canada.
The Artists’ Bookfair - The Barbican, London.
Habitat Ltd. - Canterbury.
Mercury Gallery - Cork Street, London.