212:, and his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. In contemporary debates around abstraction versus figuration he tended to push past the battle-lines: âcolour thinkingâ as opposed to âimage thinkingâ, pictorial form versus representational meaning, in order to get at something beneath their seeming differences. Images themselves arose out of the stuff of painting and an intimate relationship with a technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of a painting's structure. He saw colour in terms of images and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, âthe natural complexity of paintingâ.
219:âThe Sequenceâ begun in the 1970s, and by the time of his death, constituting nearly 200 works represented a striking formal innovation. Regarded by Kiff as a single work, it was a series of pictures (acrylic on paper), forming a chain, repeating and developing imagery and colour, and allowing their networks of association to move and develop laterally across many formats, with a single energy carrying them along.
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Colour and colour relationships interacted in his paintings with a range of images evoking the blissfully radiant and lyrical to the comic and disturbingly grotesque. âFantasyâ as he saw it âwas a way of thinking about realityâ. The matter-of-fact imagery of streets, houses, trees, animals and
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By the late 1980s his range of media had expanded to include woodcuts, monotypes, lithography and etching. He enjoyed how new ways of working with materials, the grain of the wood, for example, or the wax in the encaustics, could extend his visual thinking and force him to make decisions more
181:, and a cultural climate intent on re-assessing figurative art following the Royal Academy's âNew Spirit in Paintingâ exhibition in 1981. He started exhibiting at Nicola Jacob's gallery, moved to Fischer Fine Art in 1987, and finally to the
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people was configured with dreamlike encounters and happenings in a way that invited the viewer into an internal world constantly using the external world as its subject-matter.
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Despite his success, Kiff's position was never a comfortable one. His commitment to the pictorial values of modernism, his deep respect for artists such as
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in 1990, by which time he had begun exhibiting internationally and had work in major public collections. He was elected to the
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1987 Current
Affairs, British Painting and Sculpture in the 80s, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and British Council touring
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1997 Malcolm Miles, Something
Unknown must be Eaten or Drunk, Point â Art + Design Research Journal, no 5 spring/summer
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1990 Nine
Contemporary Painters, A Personal Choice, selected by Andrew Lambirth, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
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1991 Andrew
Lambirth, In conversation with the Artist, Ken Kiff, The Artist's and Illustrator's Magazine, no 54, March
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1999 Andrew
Lambirth, Ken Kiff and the Weather in the Soul, Marlborough Fine Art, London, catalogue introduction
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1993 Ken Kiff, Thoughts on Being at the
National Gallery, and Norbert Lynton, catalogue Introduction, October
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1985 Timothy Hyman, The
Meeting of Contrasted Elements, Ken Kiff Paintings * 1965-85, Arts Council catalogue
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1980 Peter Fuller, Ken Kiff, Art
Monthly no 34; reprinted in The Naked Artist, Writers and Readers, * 1983
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1981 John
Elderfield, New Work on Paper 1, Museum of Modern Art, New York, catalogue Introduction
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1979 Norbert Lynton, Ken Kiff, Gardner Centre
Gallery, Sussex University, catalogue Introduction
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1982 Issues: New Allegory 1, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
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1988 Marina Warner, The Tree of Life: New Images of an Ancient Symbol, Southbank Centre, Spring
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1979 Martha Kapos, Ken Kiff, Gardner Centre Gallery, Sussex University, catalogue Introduction
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quickly. He took great pleasure in collaborating with master printmaking technicians such as
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1985 Martha Kapos, Illuminating Images, Ken Kiff Paintings * 1965-85, Arts Council catalogue
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1985 Michael Sheperd, The British Show, Art Gallery New South Wales, catalogue Introduction
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1998 Norbert Lynton: Ken Kiff's Sequence, Ed. Iain Biggs, MakingSpace Publishers, Bristol
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1981 Stuart Bradshaw, Ken Kiff, Talbot Rice Art Centre, Edinburgh, catalogue Introduction
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1973 Magic and Strong Medicine, selected by Norbert Lynton, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
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1986 Ken Kiff Paintings * 1965-85, Serpentine Gallery, London, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
169:(29 May 1935 – 15 February 2001) was an English figurative artist, who was born in
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1981 New Works on Paper 1, curated by John Elderfield, Museum of Modern Art, New York
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1955-61. He came to prominence in the 1980s thanks to the championship of art critic
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1970 Critic's Choice, selected by Norbert Lynton, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
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2001 Tell me a Picture, selected by Quentin Blake, The National Gallery, London
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1981 Hilton Kramer, Expressionism Returns to Painting, New York Times, 12 July
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1979 Narrative Painting, selected by Timothy Hyman, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
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1989 Tree of Life, Southbank Centre, London, Corner House Gallery, Manchester
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1984 The British Art Show, Ikon Gallery and City Gallery Museum, Birmingham
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2008 Ken Kiff Paintings and Works on Paper, Marlborough Fine Art, London
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1993 Richard Cork, Unfinished Business on his Easel, The Times, 7 Dec
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1989 Malcolm Miles, Shadows and Rainbows, Ken Kiff, Alba, April
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and Mark Balakjian in Britain, Erik Hollgersson in Sweden, and
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1981 John Ashbery, Pleasures of Paper Work, Newsweek, 16 March
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1983 Iain Biggs, Uses and Abuses of Myth, Artscribe no 38 Jan
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1980 Michael Mason, In Pursuit of Visual Rhymes, TLS, 22 Feb.
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1988 Martha Kapos, Ken Kiff, Art Monthly, no 118 July August
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2001 Andrew Lambirth, Ken Kiff, Thames and Hudson, London
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1991 Ken Kiff, Recent Work, Marlborough Fine Art, London
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1997 British Figurative Art, Painting, The Human Figure
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2001 Retrospective Paintings, Works on Paper, Prints,
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309:1983 Alive to it All, Serpentine Gallery, London
268:1996 Marlborough Fine Art & Graphics, London
265:1993-94 Ken Kiff at the National Gallery, London
346:1979 Timothy Hyman, Ken Kiff, Artscribe no 17
324:1994 Here and Now, Serpentine Gallery, London
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189:in 1991 and became Associate Artist at the
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426:"Ken Kiff, 65, Artist Devoted to Fantasy"
193:1991â93. His 30-year teaching career at
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250:1981 Talbot Rice Art Centre, Edinburgh
201:influenced a generation of students.
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253:1982 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York
247:1980 Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London
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564:20th-century English male artists
283:Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
490:5 artworks by or after Ken Kiff
544:Alumni of Middlesex University
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549:20th-century English painters
281:2019 Ken Kiff: The Sequence,
259:1988 Fischer Fine Art, London
244:Gallery, University of Sussex
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289:Selected group exhibitions
458:Lambirth, Andrew (2001).
235:Selected solo exhibitions
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554:English male painters
335:Selected bibliography
195:Chelsea School of Art
187:Royal Academy of Arts
175:Hornsey School of Art
87:Hornsey School of Art
539:People from Dagenham
513:Studio International
273:Marlborough Fine Art
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67:(2001-02-15)
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534:2001 deaths
529:1935 births
231:in the US.
51:29 May 1935
523:Categories
411:References
208:, Miro or
47:1935-05-29
439:2 January
133:RA (1991)
89:(1955â61)
80:Education
509:Ken Kiff
500:Ken Kiff
461:Ken Kiff
275:, London
197:and the
171:Dagenham
161:Ken Kiff
114:teaching
104:Painting
55:Dagenham
28:Ken Kiff
150:kenkiff
145:Website
127:Elected
504:Artnet
494:Art UK
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73:London
240:1979
515:, UK
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470:ISBN
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206:Klee
152:.com
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41:Born
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