James Kerr’s exhibition Blooms has a distinct sensibility, it is based in minimalism and conceptualism but is tempered by a softness and romanticism that is Kerr’s own. In this exhibition Kerr continues his exploration of the culture of flowers, in particular roses. Kerr’s roses are lifted from this culture and are a little hesitant and doubtful. Salvador Dali once said, “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot”.
What characterises Kerr’s work and what makes it contemporary, is that he equivocates between the Romantic and the iconoclastic, between the celebration of the expansive culture of the rose and it’s declassing. The rose is obviously one of the classic tropes of Western art and literature but Kerr adeptly repositions our expectations of the rose.
- Oliver Watts, 2014

*image (left)
Bloom I (12), 2O14
Inkjet print, 42 x 61.5 cm 
courtesy of the artist and Chalk Horse