Ken Kiff: The National Gallery Project

Hales is delighted to announce The National Gallery Project, a solo exhibition by Ken Kiff (b. 1935, Dagenham, Essex — d. 2001, London, UK) — a major British artist known for his visionary and distinct practice. Kiff’s first show at the gallery centres on works directly connected to his time as Associate Artist in Residence at the National Gallery between 1991-1993. He was the second artist to hold the position, following Paula Rego.  

 

Primarily a painter, Kiff pursued the formal qualities of painting — of shape, line, texture, transparency and colour. His practice was driven by an exploration of the material and emotional properties of colour, viewing colour as image, and image as colour. Kiff would work on many pieces over years at a time – this process is exemplified by The Sequence, which spanned decades and 200 works, a ‘continuous flux’ of image and form which resembles a long episodic dream: allowing thoughts and imagery to spill over into the next work, creating reoccurring themes and symbolic motifs.

 

The Associate Artist Residency meant Kiff had a studio in the National Gallery for eighteen months with access to the collection day and night. The unique opportunity was not undertaken lightly as it meant abandoning accumulated works in progress at his home studio — unsettling a flow of thinking, in pursuit of a new direction. This would ultimately be freeing, and the completion of the residency led Kiff to a period of great imagination and creativity. During his time at the National Gallery, he made numerous drawings, notebook sketches, charcoals, monoprints and etchings, as well as starting fifty paintings. Reflective of his wider methodology and practice, he continued to work on paintings for many years after, revisiting the richness of ideas around imagery, material and colour. The exhibition at Hales shows a selection of works around key themes and techniques he continued to explore into the 1990s.  

 

Kiff’s approach to looking at the Old Masters in the National Gallery was deeply personal and intense. Rather than copying works in their entirety, he was ‘in search of what for him is its essence, not needing to re-present the whole, let alone retell its story.’[1] Themes he developed before the residency continued to evolve through his engagement with the collection. He integrated central motifs in his art, such as the small figure within a vast landscape and the concept of the journey, the everyday, the encounter and the tree, with the works he chose to study. Drawn to paintings which linked to these ideas, Kiff studied Ruben’s trees and the journey in Pisanello’s The Vision of St Eustace or the small, solitary figure in Patinir’s Saint Jerome. In Kiff’s Woman Watching a Murder (1996) the shadowy figures are an element from Bellini’s The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr completely reimagined.

 

Looking to these historic works, which for Kiff focused on subject matter, strengthened the artist’s modernist and formal ideals which go beyond story telling. He wanted to find a balance and a wholeness in his works and was ‘burning to get the colour moving and couldn’t do it by copying a picture upstairs.’[2] Kiff’s works remain fresh with an immediacy, deriving from his use of the sensuous properties of materials and colour. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in his work in the context of contemporary figurative painting, with many younger artists influenced by the impact and legacy of his practice.   

 

Kiff had important solo exhibitions including Ken Kiff at the National Gallery (1993), Talbot Rice Art Centre, Edinburgh (1981), Serpentine Gallery, London (1986) and Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (1986). He was included in the artist and curator Timothy Hyman’s seminal touring exhibition Narrative Paintings in 1979. In 1981 Kiff’s work was included in New Work on Paper I, curated by John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (which toured the US). Recently The Sequence was the focus of a major solo exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2018-2019).  

 

Kiff’s work is held in many collections including Arts Council England, UK; The British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Tate Britain, London, UK; and many others.