DORSET.- TheGallery is presenting the exhibition Ian McKeever: Against Architecture, a new configuration of the installation originally curated by Robin Klassnik (Matt's Gallery London) in 2017.
McKeever’s site-specific installation, originally shown at Matt’s Gallery, London in 2017, is presented in a newly envisaged installation specifically made for the Upper Gallery at AUB. Using standard building materials, 3 x 2 stud walling timbers and sheets of plasterboard, often with the manufacturers’ markings left exposed, the artist creates what might loosely be called a labyrinth through the gallery. Making the space a provisional structure of passageways, cul-de-sacs and multiple viewing points.
Onto these raw and often only half-closed walls, McKeever has placed a series of small photographic-painted panels. In doing so he sets up an interplay between the specifics of space depicted or implied in the photographic-painted works and the broader space within the quasi-architectural structure that supports them.
"The proposition in the title of the exhibition – Against Architecture – suggests both proximity to its noun and variants within it. A claim to pictoriality is challenged, as much by the atomised formal structures McKeever adopts in the works themselves, as by the makeshift structures he hangs them on. The installation is an exploration of how the fragility of pictorial illusion subsists amid a world of contingencies. In a contemporary visual culture, in which images come cheap, the effect is to re-establish our sense of them as fugitive, mysterious and hard-won." – Mark Prince
Known primarily as a painter, Ian McKeever presents in the Lower Gallery a monumental painting from the Henge Painting series (2017-23), together with works on paper and photogravures, drawing out some of the parallels and divergencies that have informed his longstanding engagement with painting and photography. Resonances and discords that are brought to the fore, when these two practices are aligned.
Ian McKeever’s first solo exhibition was held in 1973 at the ICA, London. In 1989, he was awarded the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin, which was followed in 1990 by a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
He has participated in numerous museums exhibitions including Dialogue, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1985); New Abstraction, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1996); Royal Academicians in China, National Gallery, Beijing, Shanghai Art Museum and Royal Academy of Arts, London (2005); Tate Britain (2011); and National Museum of Norway (2012).
Solo museums exhibitions include Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Kunstverein Braunschweig (1987); Porin Taidemuseo (1997); Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense (2001); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2010); Sønderjylland Kunstmuseum (2011); Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop (2012); and Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2014).
His work is represented in numerous public Collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Fine Art, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.
