Villa Serpentara Fellowship 2025
Vita
As a self-proclaimed realist, Kemp’s main interest is in “things that the mind already knows” (Jasper Johns). The overarching drive of his multimedia work is an experimentation with the possibilities and variations of realism based on the things that the world has long since laid out before us. There is a certain formal demand for restraint in the work, emphasised individuality and impulsive expression are bypassed, and an attempt is made to expose sensibilities that are generally perceived as opposites: the historical and the contemporary, devaluation and revaluation, humour and seriousness, “pop” and conceptualism, life and death.
Residency
I am interested in Olevano Romano’s role as a place representing realistic art in the 19th century. To what extent was this idea of realism interspersed with aspects of idealisation and romanticism, as well as longing and projection? In short, how much realism was actually contained in this realism? I would also like to ask: Amid this landscape, which is generally described as idyllic, is it possible to create art that, as Rainald Goetz put it, “also reveals a social problem”?