05.08.25
Community
Light language
For Ingvar Kenne, light is more than exposure. It carries character – reactive, alive. It creates atmosphere, shapes tone. And it introduces resistance: the kind of necessary friction that slows you down, asks you to look again. Through Kenne’s lens light softens, sharpens, conceals and reveals, and gives an otherwise stationary sculpture its mood.
Best known for his evocative portraiture in CITIZEN — since 1995 and ongoing — he has lately turned his lens to landscape in a portrait of [country], a study in presence and place. We invited Kenne to turn his attentive eye to the National Gallery of Australia, capturing our National Sculpture Garden Limited Edition Gift Sets.
“I’m a big fan of first light, last light – overcast is good… It quietens the whole picture down.”
This collaboration marks the latest chapter in our partnership with the National Gallery of Australia. Together, we invited Ingvar Kenne to create a limited-edition series of photographs inspired by the National Sculpture Garden: a living gallery where art and nature meet, shift, and evolve with every season. Each gift set celebrates one of our core fragrances – Buddha Wood, Flannel Flower and Boronia – and comes adorned with one of three black-and-white photographic stills taken by Kenne in the garden.
These images sit somewhere between portrait and place. As Kenne puts it: “The purpose of this is to kind of introduce or depict a sculpture, but also the garden you sit in, and also the building the garden surrounds,” he says. “It’s not about saying ‘this is a sculpture of such-and-such’. [Rather], let’s put the context where you feel the garden around the sculpture.”
"These are so complex, some of these sculptures. I didn’t want to show them in their entirety."
This layered way of seeing – more feeling than fact – comes through each of the three stills. The first captures Ouroboros (2021–24) by the artist Lindy Lee, a monumental stainless steel work commissioned to celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary in 2022. “It’s an extraordinary sculpture,” says Kenne. “Every angle there is something special. It’s just a beautiful thing and you can interpret it in so many ways.”
Lindy Lee, Ouroboros 2021-24, commissioned to celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary in 2022, © Lindy Lee / Copyright Agency 2025.
Another is not a sculpture at all, but the concrete façade of the National Gallery itself – a gesture that honours the architecture of the structure, and expands the notion of what the garden frames and is framed by.
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra. Photograph © Ingvar Kenne 2025.
The third focuses on Cones (1982) by Bert Flugelman: a gleaming cluster of mirrored stainless-steel forms in the Lakeside Garden. The image is full of Kenne’s characteristic restraint; composition that elicits presence.
Bert Flugelman, Cones 1982, commissioned 1976, purchased 1982, © Bert Flugelman / Copyright Agency 2025.
For Kenne, the process of arriving at these images is as important as the final frames themselves. “They have a personality, and you just have to wait for that personality… Every aspect of what’s included is as important as what you exclude.” That patience, that effort, is felt in the final work.
Kenne has spent over four decades refining his practice, paring it back to a single camera, a single lens, a single film stock. He talks of photography not as capture but as encounter between artist, subject, context and the elements, and he draws on insight from the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two, three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
