CV
Born 1989 in Sydney, Australia
Currently works and resides in Sydney, Australia
Awards/Education
2023 Burwood Art Prize (Finalist), Sydney, AU
2015 Bachelor of Film Production, SAE, Sydney, AU
Exhibitions
Solo/Duo
2023 It Was Written (with Joel Izak Smith), Abstract Thoughts, Sydney AU
2022 I Wish God Was Alive To See This, Nano Gallery, Sydney. AU
Group
2025 Voyeurism, Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, AU
2025 Works On Paper, China Heights, Sydney, AU
2025 Very Important Painting, Darlings, Sydney, AU
2025 The Garage, Toxic Arts, London, UK
2024 Neither Dream, Nor Delusion, China Heights, Sydney, AU
2023 Burwood Art Prize, Sydney, AU
2020 Love Matilda, Goodspace, Sydney, AU
2018 Omni Salvation, Center Red , Moscow, RU
BIO
Wade Kelly (b.1989) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist based in Sydney whose practice explores the unstable architecture of language and its entanglement with power, belief, and perception. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, he draws from a background in film and poetry to examine how linguistic systems encode ideology, construct belief, and delimit the boundaries of perception.
Rather than communicate, his work destabilises—fracturing inherited phrases, institutional logics, and typographic conventions to reveal the slippages between signifier and meaning. Text becomes site and symptom, where belief falters and interpretation begins. Found materials and typographic residue are deployed not for representation but for disruption: to expose how language constructs the visible and regulates the possible.
Kelly’s practice is rooted in critical disobedience. Through material interventions and conceptual restraint, he exposes the soft violence of cultural legibility—the quiet coercions embedded in the vernacular of power, progress, and piety. His work resists resolution not to obscure, but to widen the field of interpretation. In the space between legibility and collapse, he stages a poetics of uncertainty—where meaning is neither given nor lost, not as failure but as the precondition for reimagining what language, and its power, still make possible.