Ian McKeever (born 1946) is a British artist who has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally.
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He began painting in 1968, following studies in English Literature in London, and in 1970 took his first studio at SPACE, St. Katherine's dock, London, an artists' initiative set up by Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley. He is currently based in Dorset, Britain, and is Visiting Professor in Painting at the Faculty of Art and Architecture at the University of Brighton, and Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy School of Arts in London. In 2003 he was elected a Royal Academician.
From the beginning, McKeever's interests were concerned with landscape and he began to incorporate painting panels with natural elements to create landscape installations. His first group exhibition was held in West Berlin in 1971, and this was soon followed by his first solo exhibition at Cardiff Arts Centre, which involved the combination of painted panels with rocks spilling onto the gallery floors. He was awarded his first Arts Council Bursary in 1973 and in that same year, held his first London solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). This exhibition combined large cut rocks and painted wall panels in an environmental installation. Soon after this, McKeever began to exhibit his painting installations out of doors, showing either the preliminary drawings or maquettes in galleries, or occasionally the photographic record of the work in situ.
His studio at SPACE enabled McKeever to make contact with other professional artists, including Mark Boyle and Albert Irvin, as well as with younger artists of his generation such as Robin Klassnik, James Faure Walker, and the Austrian Kurt Kocherscheidt. SPACE at St. Katherine's dock closed in 1974 and McKeever then moved to a new studio in Martello Street, east London. In the same year, he presented installations of paintings outdoors, setting up a dialogue between the natural environment and the artist's own act of mark making, of which a key work is Painting for a Hole in the Ground (1976).
With his Sand and Sea Series (1976–1977) McKeever incorporated, for the first time in his practice, the photographic documentation of the making of the works within the pieces themselves. They were exhibited in his first solo show at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, prior to touring to Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland and Galleria Foksal, Warsaw, Poland. He exhibited with the Nigel Greenwood Gallery from 1977 to 1987. In the group of paintings Traditional Landscapes (1982–1984), photography is now fully integrated with over-painting. It is around the late 1980s that he began to move away from the use of the photograph as an over-painted collage towards pure painting with A History of Rocks(1986–1988). This particular body of work consists of 40 canvases, one for each year of the artist’s life. They are restricted to the use of mainly black and white, a palette which will remain with McKeever until the mid 1990s. In the following series of paintings, Door Paintings (1990–1994), McKeever continued his practice of working in large groups, something he has adhered to until today.
“One of the reasons I work in groups is that I have no understanding of what a finished painting might be. The only way in which I can make sense of completion is by establishing a body of work which collectively constitutes a way of meaning, a lexicon, which has a specific sense of identity.”
From 1989 to 1990, McKeever and his family lived in West Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, where he completed his large scale two part paintings, the Diptychs (1983–1990). This latter period saw McKeever’s concerns with architectural forms and the human body becoming more apparent in his work. Shortly after his return to the UK, a major retrospective exhibition titled Paintings 1978-1990, took place at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, curated by Catherine Lampert.
The following year McKeever moved out of London to Hartgrove in Dorset, where he soon began to work on the Hartgrove Paintings(1992–1994), alongside the smaller Hour Paintings (1992-). He will return to the latter works time and again over the years.
The Marianne North Paintings (1994–1995)—three paintings, two measuring 265 x 703 cm and one 265 x 527 cm—were made specifically for Matt’s Gallery, London, in 1995. These saw, for the first time, the re-emergence of colour in McKeever’s painting.
In 2001, McKeever began to work on the Four Quartets Paintings (2001–2007), a group of large canvases prompted by hearing Paul Schofield reciting T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets . In 2004 however, he re-evaluated this concept as he recognized that the Four Quartets needed to emerge out of main groups of already evolving paintings. This series of paintings was finally completed in 2007 and consisted of 16 paintings, four from each of the following groups: Symmetries(2001–2002), Here Paintings(2003–2004), Temple Paintings(2004–2006) and Assembly Paintings(2006–2008). These were exhibited for the first time at the Morat-Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft Freiburg im Breisgau, revealing the quality and presence of light in the paintings as being more pronounced.
"The quality of light in a painting intrigues me enormously: how to imbue a painting with light so that one is not actually depicting it, but somehow its quality is implicitly within the painting—-almost emanating from it."[2]
Between 2004 and 2006 McKeever continued his interest in the relationship between architecture and bodily forms in the Temple Paintings (2004–2006)—these constitute the largest paintings within the Four Quartets.
Since the mid 1970s, McKeever has maintained the practice of writing both on his own work and on subjects that interest him, as well as keeping journals and sketchbooks and taking photographs whilst traveling, and although he stopped making direct references to the landscape in the mid 1980s, McKeever has continued to travel extensively. Remote areas, including Greenland, Papua New Guinea, and Eastern Siberia have all impacted on his work. However, he would also cite more specific cultural experiences such as the Buddhist Temples in China, the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin, and the Bucovina and its sixteenth-century exterior painted churches as being significant. Romanesque churches]] and wall paintings in Catalonia or Cappadocia, Turkey, are of ongoing interest to him.
Other significant cultural references are Barnett Newman, Clifford Still, Joan Mitchell and the writings of Robert Smithson.
Alongside his paintings, McKeever produces works on paper, etchings, lithographs, and photographs.
McKeever has lectured extensively in Great Britain, as well as in Germany and the USA. He has taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, alongside Tess Jaray, Bruce McLean and John Hilliard; Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London; Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, [[alongside Per Kirkeby, Jörg Immendorf and the architect Peter Cook; the University of Brighton]]; and the Royal Academy Schools, the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
McKeever has written numerous texts and essays on art, including personal reflections on painting and on other painters' works. His 1982 manifesto titled Black and White...Or how to paint with a hammer, expounded his internal conflict between the subjective nature of painting and the more conceptual parameters his work had adhered to so far. Black and white and very grey areas, the second manifesto, was published in connection with an exhibition of his Door Paintings at the Cairn Gallery, NailsworthIn 2005, his lectures at the University of Brighton and Cambridge University were published as three essays in the book In Praise of Painting, and covered topics including the presence and absence of light in Western painting.
Writings on other artists include Thoughts on Emil Nolde in 1996; Absolute Light, an essay on Russian icons for the British Museum magazine and re-published in 2008 in Ikoni Maalari, Helsinki; Thinking about Georgia O'Keeffe for the Louisiana Revy, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Between the Wall and the Floor, an essay on the sculptures of Kurt Kocherscheidt, for Kocherscheidt's catalogue raisonné; Stilled Life for the Vilhelm Hammershøi exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; The Icon and the Painting, an essay on Rembrandt and Icon painting was published in Ikoni Maalari, Helsinki, 2009.
Writings from his travels include reflections and diary notes, such as Grønland, 1989; The Marianne North Paintings, 1995; 'Chaun' and 'Images of Permafrost', 1995; and Gradually Going Magadan, 1996.
Arts Council of Great Britain, London / British Council, London / British Museum, London / Government Art Collection of Great Britain, London / Red Mansion Foundation, London / The Royal Academy of Art, London / Tate Gallery, London / Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham / Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston / Huddersfield Gallery, Huddersfield / Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds / John Creasey Collection, Salisbury / Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, Warwick / Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne / Scottish National Gallery of Moden Art, Edinburgh / Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, Austria / Horsens Kunstmuseum, Horsens, Denmark / Løvbjergs Almene Fond, Horsens, Denmark / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark / New Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark / New Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark / Sønderjyllands Kunstmuseum, Tønder, Denmark / Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland / Kuopio Art Museum, Kuopio, Finland / Porin Taidemuseo, Pori, Finland / Morat-Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, Freiburg, Germany / Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern, Germany / Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany / Museum Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany / Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany / Museum of Fine Art, Budapest, Hungary / Nordic Aquarell Museum, Skärham, Sweden / National Gallery of South Africa, Johannesburg / Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA / Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA / Cincinnati Museum of Modern Art, Cincinnati, USA / The Haggerty Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee, USA / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA / MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts, USA / Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA
Galleri Susanne Ottesen [1], Copenhagen, Denmark
Alan Cristea [2], London, UK
Galleri Forsblom [3], Helsinki, Finland
Galleri Andersson Sandström [4], Stockholm, Sweden
Schaltwerk-Kunst [5], Hamburg, Germany