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Johnny Romeo

Banked Up

Name: Banked Up - Harvey Galleries
SKU: H35304
Price: 8895.00 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock

SKU: H35304

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas

124 x 124 cm Framed

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When you live life as an infamous outlaw, not even the rules of death can stop you. In Johnny Romeo’s gleefully macabre painting Banked Up, the legendary bushranger Ned Kelly re-emerges from the dead as a Technicolour ghoul, clawing his way back to the land of the living to encourage us to march to the beat of our own drum. While Kelly’s face, with his steely, well-coiffed gaze and signature beard, remain intact, Romeo replaces the bushranger’s armour-clad body with a vibrant skeleton, ingeniously playing off the fact that no-one really knows what Kelly’s body looked like under his iconic iron suit. Teetering between folklore renegade and flesh-eating fiend, Romeo’s bone-rattling rendition of Kelly is a humorous reminder that we can be whoever and whatever we want to be, both in life and the afterlife. The clever wordplay of ‘No Ghouls Rules, in this sense, is a powerful mantra that empowers us to embrace the rebellious spirit of Ned Kelly and throw out the very rulebooks that stand in the way of living a free, authentic life. Kelly’s legacy of rule-breaking is further alluded to in the title Banked Up, a cheeky reference to the bushranger’s penchant for raiding banks with the Kelly Gang. On a hilariously grisly note, Romeo’s ‘barebones bushranger’ is anything but a ‘banked up’ heap in the conventional sense of the phrase, highlighting that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, even beyond the grave.

Edition of 10

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About Johnny Romeo

Johnny Romeo is an internationally acclaimed Australian painter. Considered Australia’s leading Pop artist, Romeo is spearheading the global Neo-Expressionist Pop movement with his electrifying collision of rock’n’roll swagger, comic book aesthetics and street art. Described by GQ Magazine Australia as ‘part punk, part pop’, Romeo’s Kitsch Pop works are explosive sugar rushes of Technicolour imagery and urban grittiness that are turning heads worldwide.