Michael Kidner: Paintings, drawings, sculpture
This exhibition of British artist Michael Kidner’s oeuvre revealed both the variety of his art and the underlying consistency of his vision.
Kidner (1917-2009) came to prominence for his contribution to abstraction and Op art in the 1960s.
Over 100 works were displayed ranging in date from the late 1950s to 1984. These works included Ochre, blue and violet, Formation and transformation, Yellow, blue, green and white wave, and Column in front of its own image II.
In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Peter Brades explained the logic of the last of these works, a large painting from 1971 (that was acquired by the Tate in 2001), which took the form of a curved, glass-fibre column placed in front of a painting. The painting represented the faces and curves of the column as it was rotated clockwise. Three of the four faces were shown, with the vertical stripes recording six turns of 15 degrees from face to face, reading the canvas from left to right. The colours were coded from the spectrum, with red representing the curve on the edge nearest the spectator and blue the farthest.
