REVIEW | Ken Done: Done Right

The central room of "Ken Done: No Rules" features a 360-degree, animated projection of Done’s artworks, welcoming audiences into his particular vision of the world around us. What follows at Home of the Arts (HOTA) is a sweeping survey of a painter whose practice has spanned decades and shaped the visual identity of contemporary Australia. Seeing his work together here feels not only timely but inevitable, as though the bright, sun-soaked world of the Gold Coast of Queensland has been waiting to host such a celebratory showcase. The survey presents Done not merely as a painter of recognisable motifs—the beach, the reef, the luminous domestic scene—but as an artist who has built a career by merging personal vision with public imagination. This is a show that captures both the intimacy of Done’s practice and the scale of his cultural presence.

Ken Done, The Cabin Studio, 1980, oil on canvas, 76 x 289 cm.

The exhibition opens with paintings that place Done in conversation with some of the great names of art history. He has always been something of an iconoclast, a painter unafraid of drawing inspiration from others while insisting on his own distinct voice. One of the early highlights, Starry, starry, starry night, 1998, is an emphatic riff on van Gogh, its title practically shouting across the gallery. Alongside this is the softer, more meditative Looking out to see Lloyd Rees, 1988, a quieter vision, a painting suffused with gentle light. By opening with these works, the exhibition offers visitors a firm footing. Done’s practice is not built in isolation but in dialogue, whether with Rees or van Gogh, or Matisse, or Milton Avery, or the long tradition of landscape painting that stretches across continents.

Looking out to see Lloyd Rees, 1988, oil on canvas, 101 x 75 cm.

From there, the exhibition pivots toward the personal, inviting us into the painter’s private world. The second gallery feels like a walk through the artist’s front garden, populated by people and places closest to him. His wife and collaborator Judy appears in the radiant portrait Judy, 2014, a simple outline in a field of blooms. Next up are canvases of the Done family home and studio, works that position domestic space as a site of creativity. These paintings recall the joyous colour of David Hockney’s Hotel Acatlán series, 1984-85, with their architectural rhythms and impossible perspectives, yet Done renders them through his distinctly Antipodean lens. The Cabin Studio I-III, 1980, in particular forms an anchor for the show, a celebration of the very environment that nurtures his practice. In it, there is an echo of the intimacy of Cressida Campbell and the restless energy of Brett Whiteley, but always with that Done spin—lighter, sunnier, and stubbornly optimistic.

Water is never far from Done’s gaze. Throughout his career, wedges of blue splice his canvases like glimpses through windows. The exhibition section “Between the Flags” takes us right to the beach, making this affinity explicit. Here the atmosphere changes: the room radiates with warm orange light, echoing the heat of an Australian summer afternoon. Recent painting A very hot afternoon at the beach, 2024, is a fiery highlight, its surface glowing with intensity, while Beach January II, 1998, offers respite, a gentle counterpoint in soft yellows. The striking Beach drawing black I, 1995, demonstrates Done’s more graphic side, its oil crayon marks pressing boldly over the black acrylic void. This room situates the beach not simply as subject matter but as a kind of national icon, refracted through Done’s specific, focused sense of colour.

Beach January II, 1998, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 150 cm.

If Done is known for his paintings, he is equally celebrated for his collaborations. The exhibition wisely devotes space to this aspect of his career, highlighting the artist’s embrace of design and popular culture. His decade-long work providing the cover illustrations for the bi-weekly Japanese magazine Hanako, brought Done’s vision to international audiences and remains a triumph of taste and style. Nearby, the paintings that became products in partnership with household brands like Sheridan and Oroton, even BMW, demonstrate his capacity to translate painterly energy into design that lives in people’s homes. But it is the recent collaboration with fashion duo Romance Was Born that feels most vital. Together, Done and designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales have produced work that is exuberant, idiosyncratic and, deeply reverent of each other. It is an exchange that shows how collaboration can elevate each party, unlocking possibilities beyond the individual. Like the best relationships, they make each other better, sharper, more alive.

The final room brings us underwater. Here, Done’s reef paintings, including some of his newest works in the exhibition, shimmer with movement and colour, canvases teem with fish, coral, and currents of light. They are painted from the perspective of a diver, close-up and immersive. They are layered yet never heavy, watery, and bright in effect, capturing the vitality of reef ecosystems. Thinking about a Sunday dive, 2023, conveys both immediacy and reflection, a painter’s memory of immersion. Big postcard from the Great Barrier Reef, 2022, turns the reef into a joyful message, its vibrant fish darting across the canvas. These works remind us of Done’s lifelong dialogue with the ocean, a relationship that is ecological, aesthetic, and deeply personal.

Installation view details, Ken Done: No Rules, 2025, Home of the Arts, Surfers Paradise, Queensland. Photo, Home of the Arts.

Ken Done: No Rules represents the largest institutional survey of the artist’s work to date. It celebrates an artist still painting and still responding to the world around him. It shows us the artist in dialogue with other painters, with his family, with design, with the beach and reef, and with the Australian imagination itself. Done’s work insists on the power of colour, optimism, and play. To experience this show on the Gold Coast is to feel art and place align: a painter whose language is light, water, and joy, presented in a city that embodies those very qualities. It is a fitting celebration of Ken Done, his impact, and a reminder of how art can both shape and reflect the world we live in.

EXHIBITION
Ken Done: No Rules
13 September 2025 – 15 February 2026
Home of the Arts, Surfers Paradise, Queensland

Images courtesy of the artist; The Done Group, Sydney; Home of the Arts, Surfers Paradise, Queensland.

This issue was first published in Artist Profile Issue 73.

Bradley Vincent is an independent curator and writer based on Queensland’s Gold Coast.