The Suit (1988)

The Suit is a conceptual wall painting installation by Garry Neill Kennedy. This work is one of many wall paintings he developed focusing on “deconstruction,” a painting process he developed through which the creation of new forms is achieved by alienating an existing form from its expected or prescribed context. For The Suit, Kennedy deconstructed a Vogue Men's pattern for a size 42 business suit into its 47 parts (including lapels, sleeves and pockets), measured the surface area for each piece to convert these into squares of correlating sizes, then painted these squares throughout the given exhibition space in canary-yellow (the colour of the tiled floor of Cold City where the work was first shown). Exhibited alongside the squares was “47 parts of Suit," the transparent tailors pattern with Kennedy’s notations used to calculate the size of each square.

Kennedy worked site-specifically for each re-staging of The Suit. At Portikus, the work began on the exterior pillars of the gallery's classical façade and continued into the exhibition hall. Each of the squares affixed to the buildings exterior represented a fabric panel for a suit of Kennedy’s size, while the squares running throughout the exhibition halls represented the surface area of the same suit’s pockets. 

An early version of The Suit was shown in 1988 at Cold City Gallery (Toronto, ON), then subsequently site-specifically recreated as part of Garry Neill Kennedy: Wall Paintings and Related Works 1974-1995 at Portikus (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1998), before a second showing at Cold City Gallery in 1998. The Suit was later re-articulated as part of Kennedy's retrospective Work of Four Decades (National Gallery of Canada/The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2000; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 2001).