90.2 x 259.1 cm
Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Ian McKeever: Going Forth, Painted Panels & Other Works, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will open with a public reception on October 10, 4-6pm, and runs through December 5th.
Ian McKeever is an acclaimed British artist whose distinguished career is marked primarily as an abstract painter. He works serially, simultaneously developing several paintings that take several years to complete. Each series is characterized with its own identity, inspired by nature, art history or culturally historic works, and all share the artist’s preoccupation with light, transparency and the bodily presence.
The two predominant series featured in the exhibition are the new Going Forth paintings and the continuing Painted Panels which the artist began in 2012.
Following his five-year engagement with the Henge Paintings, which were preoccupied with mass and volume, the color black predominantly featured and integral in depicting density, solidity and weight, McKeever felt compelled to return his inquiry into openness, transparency, and luminosity. In the Going Forth series, McKeever re-investigates translucid lyrical abstractions, this time presented in multi-paneled canvases in a mostly white palette. A singular richly saturated color, such as field green or deep navy blue, asserts structure and balance, and emphasizes transparency by appearing dusky beneath thinly veiled layers of white. McKeever applies translucid films of acrylic and oil in a manner that implies the luminosity of light, rather than pictorially depicting it. In this way, the artist renders a nebulous, ephemeral quality to the surface, a perceptual experience he has long articulated. For McKeever, the Going Forth paintings loosely suggest passages of time. “I am yesterday, today and tomorrow”, he states, in that when he paints, he is taking the present into the painting and then returns to it in the tomorrow. “You are encapsulating the creative process going forth into the future” when you paint the following day. The horizontal format of the painting suggests a narrative, a passageway, a continuation of time.
The Painted Panels are an ongoing series of monochromatic black or white paintings the artist began in 2012. McKeever returns to canvases he has “abandoned” or set aside when he feels they have “lost their way.” He selects the sections he deems successful and mounts the fragments onto wooden panel, reinvestigating them minimally or extensively to a level of conclusion. The canvases take on a new life from the one originally intended resulting in beautiful, elegant paintings that contrast with the warmth of the wooden panels. They still evoke his preoccupation with luminosity inherent to painting. All panels are alike in size and work well together in a grouping and equally hold their own as a single, stand-alone tableau. McKeever first exhibited this body of work as an installation of 30 at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne in 2014. For the artist, this ‘recycling’ series allows him to pivot from the larger scaled work providing an alternative meditative, creative channel.
Other paintings on view, the Season Addendum and “one-off” canvases, as dubbed by McKeever, depict his signature visual abstract lexicon. These latter singular paintings act as turning points, interim periods which may become the genesis and develop into a new grouping as the creative juices flow in the artist’s studio.
McKeever has had a prolific career with many solo and group exhibitions in numerous galleries and museums. His works are in many notable collections in Europe and the USA including Tate Gallery, London; British Museum, London; Royal Academy of Art, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Wien; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Arts Council of Great Britain’ The Government Art Collection; The British Council; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna; Morat Institute, Freiburg; Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Kunsthalle Kiel; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinski; New Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen; Horsens Kunstmuseum; Nordic Aquarell Museum, Sweden; Kiasma, Helsinki; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Yale Center for British Art; Boston Museum of Fine Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; and Cincinnati Museum of Modern Art.
