Michael Kidner RA 1917-2009
Silkscreen
35 x 35 cm
1990
Edition of 15
Michael Kidner was born in Kettering in 1917, he was one of six children. He attended Cambridge were he read History and Anthropology before studying Landscape Architecture at Ohio state University. He joined the Canadian arm at the outbreak of WWII and saw active service in France after D -Day. He moved to London in 1957, were he was introduced to The New American Painting exhibition at the Tate, where he experienced Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning for the first time.
Mochael Kidner identified 1970 as the year that stopped using colour in his artwork. His artistic career has been a continual experimentation with stripe and moire. Kidner saw these patterns as “the beginning and the end of a cycle”, something which straight lines could never achieve. This black and white artwork is the epitome of his opinion on colour which was that it had “no function other than to express the private taste of the artist”. He wanted to explore the spaced that lies between imagination and reality, which he thought could be articulated and investigated through the interchange between monochrome. In Whirlwind, we are introduced to Kidner’s exploration of grids and lattices, which were he observed as offering and resisting any sort of visual resolution.
His work is in many important collections including those of Tate Britain, The Royal Academy,The British Arts Council, provincial galleries as well as in Portugal, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Vienna, Tokyo Russia and America. In 2004 he was elected as a senior Royal Academician.
£1,150