Eczema from Six Pink Paintings series, surface detail, 78.7 x 78.9 cm paint on chip-board, 1994. Photo: Dalhousie Art Gallery.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), paint on chip-board each approx. 79cm x 79cm, exhibition view from Garry Neill Kennedy: Wall Paintings and Related Works 1974-1995, Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, 1996. Photo: Owens Art Gallery.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), installation detail, paint on chip-board each approx. 79cm x 79cm, with Untitled (Summary Painting) (1978), exhibition view from Work of Four Decades, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), Halifax, 2000. Photo: AGNS.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), installation detail, paint on chip-board each approx. 79cm x 79cm, exhibition view from Work of Four Decades, National Gallery of Canada (NGC), Ottawa, 2000. Photo: NGC.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), installation detail, paint on chip-board each approx. 79cm x 79cm, exhibition view from Work of Four Decades, National Gallery of Canada (NGC), Ottawa, 2000. Photo: NGC.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), installation detail, paint on chip-board each approx. 79cm x 79cm, exhibition view from Work of Four Decades, National Gallery of Canada (NGC), Ottawa, 2000. Photo: NGC.
Six Pink Paintings (1994), installation detail, exhibited in Wavelengths: Colour | Code | Concept, Dalhousie Art Gallery (DAG), Halifax, 2025. Photo: DAG
Six Pink Paintings (1994)
Six Pink Paintings is a series of chipboard paintings Kennedy produced in 1994. Each piece is around 79cm x 79cm and is individually titled after a skin disease: Dermatitis, Eczema, Impetigo, Pityriasis, Psoriasis, and Scabies.
Kennedy found everyday materials and office supplies of interest for his work, and chipboard was a construction grade building material that he began directly painting on in the early 1990s. For Six Pink Paintings, Kennedy used the unintentional patterning of the pressed wood chips as his guide, observing the surfaces in relief by painting each chip by hand.
Kennedy also liked thinking about words and titles and their relationship to colour. Naming these paintings after skin diseases brought an element of humour to these meticulous process based pieces and disrupted daily associations with the colour pink. Additionally, the majority of the time, Kennedy installed these paintings alternating flesh left on a green wall and centred on a white wall as means of interrupting the architecture of the gallery spaces they were exhibited in.
Six Pink Paintings were first exhibited at Cold City (c.1994), then at Owens Art Gallery as part of Garry Neill Kennedy: Wall Paintings and Related Works 1974-1995 (1996), and were included in Kennedy's retrospective, Work of Four Decades (2000), which toured the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, NB).
In 2010, this series was acquired into the permanent collection of the Dalhousie Art Gallery and are currently on view in Wavelengths: Colour | Code | Concept (18 July – 31 August, 2025).