Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Ian McKeever: Going Forth, Painted Panels & Other Works, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will open with an artist reception on October 10, 4-6pm, and runs through December 5th.
Ian McKeever is an acclaimed British artist whose distinguished career is marked primarily as an abstract painter. He works serially, simultaneously developing several paintings that take several years to complete. Each series is characterized with its own identity, inspired by nature, art history or culturally historic works, and all share the artist’s preoccupation with light, transparency and the bodily presence.
The two predominant series featured in the exhibition are the new Going Forth paintings and the continuing Painted Panels which the artist began in 2012.
Following his five-year engagement with the Henge Paintings, which were preoccupied with mass and volume, the color black predominantly featured and integral in depicting density, solidity and weight, McKeever felt compelled to return his inquiry into openness, transparency, and luminosity. In the Going Forth series, McKeever re-investigates translucid lyrical abstractions, this time presented in multi-paneled canvases in a mostly white palette. A singular richly saturated color, such as field green or deep navy blue, asserts structure and balance, and emphasizes transparency by appearing dusky beneath thinly veiled layers of white.
The Painted Panels are an ongoing series of monochromatic black or white paintings the artist began in 2012. McKeever returns to canvases he has “abandoned” or set aside when he feels they have “lost their way.” He selects the sections he deems successful and mounts the fragments onto wooden panel, reinvestigating them minimally or extensively to a level of conclusion. The canvases take on a new life from the one originally intended resulting in beautiful, elegant paintings that contrast with the warmth of the wooden panels.
