WADE KELLY

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.

It Was Written (with Joel Izak Smith) (2023) | Abstract Thoughts

 Sydney, Australia

 I Wish God Was Alive To See This (2022) | Nano Gallery 

 Sydney, Australia

Neither Dream Nor Delusion (2024) China Heights

Sydney, Australia

Burwood Art Prize (2023)

 Sydney, Australia

Love Matilda (2022) Goodspace

 Sydney, Australia

Omni Salvation (2018) Center Red 

Moscow, Russia