Rochfort Gallery is pleased to present 'Frontier', a rare series of paintings generated not from photography, but from a palpable sense of place. The artist, Ken Knight invites us all to celebrate raw beauty and the dignity and mystery of a wild frontier.


Renowned Australian landscape painter Ken Knight has been said to follow the grand tradition of Streeton and Roberts. In the four decades he has been painting, every canvas is made plein air, right in the heart of wherever his mobile studio takes him. Rigging up “Troopy”, an army jeep bedecked with oils, his French easel and his trusted saw (for spontaneous resizing), Knight is an allterrain painter accustomed to long days chasing the light while reinventing the line.

In over 60 solo shows, his passion for the natural world has forged a contemporary style with a gutsy gestural signature. Broad strokes and energised composition revive the places we know well and the far reaches we are likely to never see.

In this spirit, Knight’s most recent expedition was to Antarctica in February 2020. His goal to create 75 artworks in 7 days was a quest that changed him.

“This was Nirvana, Eden and a fragile Utopia rolled into one. It was a remote and meditative atmosphere so ancient that I felt insignificant. Setting up my easel on deck, and working long days, I saw whales breaching, mountains rising from the ice and wild transitions of light. The mutable conditions had me painting like quicksilver as just as I set up one tonal palette the sky would shift.”


Knight’s recollections of his days swiping with palette knives and oil in his fingerless gloves smack of adventure. In the entire week in Antarctica, he went ashore only three times. Something magnetic bound him to his freezing studio outpost ondeck.


The primal quality of the works in this show is undeniable and so is their sense of urgency.
As a wilderness, Antarctica stands on the brink. Each painting in “Frontier” asks us to rise as custodians of earth’s most pristine and vulnerable terrain:

“I absolutely embrace raising awareness for climate change and the consequent impact on the wilderness. This landscape appears to be on a knife’s edge. Warmer atmospheric temperatures in the Antarctic continent are the most obvious testament to global warming. One of the conversations that still resonates is something the captain said to me during our voyage. He commented, “I have been coming to Antarctica for twenty years, and it has only been in the last two seasons that I have seen rain."