PAINTINGS 1990-1996, Ian McKeever
Press Release:
The exhibition of the English painter Ian McKeever at the Pori Art Museum presents his work from 1990 to 1996. Featured are works from the Marianne North, Hartgrove, and Hour series, as well as newer paintings. Ian McKeever was born in 1946. He lives and works on his farm in Hartgrove, Dorset.
McKeever’s paintings are characterized by a subtle color palette and a surface that, in places, becomes translucent through numerous layers. Most often, color fields tuned to a black-gray-white scale create an impression of slowly transforming structures. McKeever’s paintings can be interpreted as metaphors for various natural processes: rising mists, freezing water, melting snow, and so on. The impression of change, time, and space in the paintings – not so much the borrowed subject of landscape – is based on McKeever’s numerous trips to remote regions of the world, including Lapland, Greenland, the Sahara, and Siberia.
“All of this, the emphasis on the physicality of painting, the labor outdoors in nature, and finally the carefully considered navigation between concepts, ultimately seems to converge at a single point: that before us we would finally have a work that does not represent nature nor is an image of painting, but would be a part of nature and a part of natural painting, showing only and exclusively itself. This is McKeever’s problem, and this is his solution.”
This is written by Timo Valjakka, director of the Helsinki Art Hall, in the catalog accompanying the exhibition. The catalog also includes an article by Jeremy Lewison, curator at the Tate Gallery in London.
Ian McKeever participated in the Air and Other Elements exhibition organized by the Pori Art Museum in 1993, as well as in the accompanying research trip to Northeast Siberia. The Eternal Ice publication, which documents the trip, includes McKeever’s sketches and writings. These sketches, as well as paintings based on McKeever’s second trip to Siberia, were exhibited in 1996 in Copenhagen, Pori, and Helsinki in the exhibition Strangers in the Arctic – Ultima Thule and the Modern Age. This exhibition will be on display in the summer of 1997 at the Ontario Art Gallery in Toronto.
Ian McKeever’s exhibition Paintings 1990-1996 at the Pori Art Museum is organized in collaboration with Angel Row Gallery (Nottingham). The exhibition has been supported by The British Council.
Translated with ChatGPT