When Reko Rennie was a young boy, his mother would take him to free cultural institutions around Melbourne, including the National Gallery of Victoria. There, he fell in love with art. “I’d spend hours in these places as a kid,” he says. “That stayed with me for a long time. When I got older, I was like, ‘Fuck, this is what I really want to do.’”
Decades later, the self-taught Kamilaroi artist’s dream is coming true with Rekospective, a major exhibition at the NGV’s Ian Potter Centre charting the last two decades of his prolific, multidisciplinary career. Among more than 100 works are early stencils, sculptural installations, multi-channel videos and neon wall pieces.
Politics are front and centre, with pieces responding to the Cronulla riots, the racism endured by AFL player Adam Goodes, and the experiences of Rennie’s grandmother, Julia, who was a child of the Stolen Generations. Remember Me, a monumental 15-metre-wide illuminated text work, memorialises the Indigenous lives lost in the frontier wars. The most recent piece in the exhibition, a painting titled Three Little Pigs, unflinchingly criticises police brutality and the “international travesty” of death in custody.
Born in 1974, Rennie grew up in the inner-west Melbourne suburb of Footscray – a “really wild place” at the time, he says, with “huge crime, lots of heroin on the streets”. It was also significantly multicultural, and Rennie says he didn’t experience racism until later in life.
It was in Footscray, as a teen, that Rennie started doing graffiti, the echoes of which are seen in his work today, from bold colours and graf-style lettering to a recurring motif of spray-paint cans.
When it came to a career, however, he initially chose journalism, motivated by the idea of being a voice for his community. “I thought I could maybe be the Indigenous correspondent, or work more with First Nations stories,” he says. Instead, when he graduated, he was assigned to the crime beat at the Age, covering harrowing stories in the courts. “I was really disillusioned with working as a journalist,” he says. “I was seeing really negative aspects of society every day.”
At home, meanwhile, he was raising a young child and making art on the kitchen floor after hours. In his mid-30s, he decided to try and take the leap. “I had the support of my family and applied for [an artist’s] residency, and I got it,” he says. “That opened up a lot of things.”
That was 15 years ago, and Rennie has been a full-time artist since. That’s not to say it was easy making the transition into what Rennie says is “a very cliquey world”. “[When I started out] I had a lot of commercial gallery directors going, ‘what are your dreams?’ I said, ‘I want to have a show in New York … I want to show at the Venice Biennale’. They’re like, ‘maybe you need to be a bit more realistic,’” he says.
Rennie responded with what he describes as a “hustle mentality from the west”. “I’ve got this chip [on my shoulder], I guess … I come from nothing, no money, a hardworking family, and my mother sacrificed a lot of things for me and for us,” he says. “[So] I was just like, ‘You know what? I’ll just try it [an art career]. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll do something else.’ I apply that attitude to my art and to the gatekeepers.” (He did end up at the Venice Biennale, in 2015 and again in 2017).
Throughout Rekospective, there are resonances and repetitions in artwork titles and phrases: I wear my crown; I was always here; remember me. Recurring hand-drawn motifs include crowns, in homage to both Jean-Michel Basquiat and the graffiti community, and diamonds, a traditional Kamilaroi symbol. Both are part of Rennie’s signature design Regalia, alongside an Aboriginal flag. “It’s an emblematic statement about the original royalty of Australia, that being Aboriginal people,” Rennie says. “We don’t need no fucking crown or jewels or gold to prove who we are.”
The past and present intertwine in the exhibition. A stencilled painting of a horse and cart tells the story of his grandmother’s forced removal; underneath it, a fixed-gear bike, built by Rennie and adorned with a painted diamond pattern and kangaroo skin, is “a metaphor for my future”.
Two paintings reflect, respectively, on Australia’s 1967 referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in its census, and the 2023 Voice referendum. YES (2017), made 50 years after the first referendum, uses the lettering from its advertising campaign, while YESMOTHERFUCKERSYES (2023) features a pattern of the same text. “We’re always quite backwards in terms of politics and rights to our Indigenous people,” Rennie says. “An apology” – he scoffs – “who gives a shit about someone saying sorry?”
In the three-channel video work OA_RR, Rennie drives a Rolls-Royce, painted in his signature lurid camouflage style, through Kamilaroi country in northern New South Wales. By “doing raging burnouts” in the defaced vehicle, he reclaims the land where the violence against his grandmother happened. (The car is also on display within the exhibition).
Colour is a defining aspect of Rennie’s practice, and Rekospective bursts with bright and bold combinations, splashed across the artworks and even the walls. “Coming from graffiti, it was always about using bright colours … I want a saturated representation of my identity,” he says.
It defies outdated Western expectations of a homogenous style of “Aboriginal art”. After all, Rennie points out, only a handful out of the hundreds of Aboriginal language groups paint dots.
“It’s really exciting that there’s this new generation that are able to tell stories from these urban perspectives,” he says. “We’re a very exciting group of contemporary Aboriginal artists now that are killing it in different mediums, and making really powerful work … It’s our time.”
REKOSPECTIVE: The Art of Reko Rennie is showing at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 11 October 2024 to 27 January 2025
