by Ken Kiff was a brilliant, strange out in British painting after the Second World War. In works that sing with color and texture, he built shaky fables, in which eyes and noses slide around faces, animals over mountains and dreams, wishes, quest men who are moved away. As a shot after modernist sizes such as Klee and Miró, Kiff made a crucial principle and mixed the abstraction with recurring symbols from a private mythology, to which birds, salamander, mountains, water, goddess-like women and the “little man”, an arched body like plasticine. His bomb -free impression of the agony and ecstasy of life, as idiosyncratic as it is available and human.
When Kiff died in 2001 at the age of 65, his reputation of the artist of a past artist, whose warm commitment to his medium and the creative process, was far from the arch, was the conceptual edition of the then dominant YBAS. Now the appreciation of his proliferously produced personal work is growing again. “He speaks with a younger generation, partly with regard to his mixture of abstraction and figuration,” says Ella-Rose Harrison, director of the Hales Gallery, in which a new exhibition has a new exhibition on his 18 months from 1992 to 1993 as “Associate Artist” in Residence in the London National Gallery. “There is also a different examination of its topics,” she adds, “to bring the Mythical into everyday or psychologically charged space.”
Kiff was the second artist of the National Gallery, who had invited to react to her art historical giants, and it was a prestigious appearance. Paula Rego was the first and smoking from Peter Blake. Nevertheless, he had reservations. “He was not institutions,” says Kiff’s daughter Anna. “He was very aware that it was a very male environment. He came from a background of the working class and it was not his comfort zone.” The Collection of the National Gallery was also very brown for an artist who was glorified in color.
Kiff worked on site in a basal studio with his huge collection of cassettes, which played everything from Baroque Cembo to Jazz, and was looking for what he described as the “essence” of paintings. He did not make many sketches there, but “looked at paintings intensively over and over again,” explains Anna. What made him the work of artists such as Rubens, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Pisanello or Giovanni di Paolo is always fresh and surprising. He had a special thing for Rubens’ trees. He paid attention to the physicality of art, be it the wood that was painted a bit or a touch of golden pigment. A splash of color of a muddy Renaissance landscape could inspire the dominant element in its own work.
Sometimes his paintings adhere closely to the originals and adapt topics and figures that were confused with their own mythologies. John the Baptist, the Hunter Saint Eustace or the Hermit Saint Jerome could be double cousins from Kiffs lonely travelers. In others, his pictures seem to improve the assumptions of the past, as with the woman who observes a murder, inspired by Bellini’s brutal all-male scene, the murder of Saint Peter Martyr. Kiff takes the blue of a lot of heaven in Bellini’s otherwise washed -out forest environment to create a azure view, in which a tiny couple is observed by a huge woman who has resigned and resigned.
Kiff later wrote that he was concerned with the National Gallery project when he did his entire work as “many interlocking thoughts” that were not visually verbal. “A painting does not become a painting because it corresponds to the rules what a painting should be,” he continued, “but because the” thought “or” understanding “happened.”
Ken Kiff: The National Gallery project is located in Hales Gallery, London, until May 24th
Driven to abstraction: five works from the exhibition
White tree, large face, 1990-1996
Kiff has left the hard floor that he has visible here. Anna remembers that he found it in harmony with “the quality of the darkness, the browns that they find in many old master paintings”. The tree was inspired by Rubens, but the face – literally falls apart – belongs to the modern world.
Woman who observes a murder in 1996 (shown on the article)
This meditation in blue shows how smoking color uses color as a structuring principle, with its halling shapes and aqua colors. It also underlines its interest in bleeding between representation and abstraction, with the Tinky midnight morast in the background indicating a cave or an intangible dark thoughts.
After Giovanni di Paolo, 1992-1993
This is one of the painting of smoking, which is closely inspired by his source, Giovanni di Paolo’s Saint John the Baptist in the desert. His elements are close to those he has already explored in his work, of the huge flowers or huge mountains that the isolated traveler in the Schermische Dandruff.
Master of St. Giles, 1994
In addition to paintings, smoking also produced prints that were inspired by his time in the National Gallery, such as this woodcut with earthy life, which was found on works by an anonymous artist from the 16th century, which was known to present Saint Giles’s friendship with a deer. “This pressure includes so many things that it found as important,” says Anna, “including our relationship with the environment.”
Castle climbs out of the sea, 1993
Kiffs shows renowned lively pallet and speaks with the castle from the water of the sea. The sun is a recurring symbol in its work with connotations of enlightenment or inspiration. However, this is not a Apollo; It crawls along and remembers one of Kiff’s other favorite tropics: the salamander.
