MIDDLESBROUGH .- Presenting the largest solo museum exhibition in over a decade, Stephen McKenna is showing his work at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Perspectives of Europe 1980 – 2014 features works from this period including paintings, drawings and watercolours of landscapes, cities and trees.

The exhibition charts McKenna’s response to living and travelling in a number of European countries. The resultant paintings, drawings and watercolours, made between 1980 and the present, reflect not only the cities, the landscapes, the people and the artefacts of the various countries, but also their history and the contents of their museums.

McKenna has had a base in Ireland since 1973 and is described by the Irish Arts Review as having a “classical approach to still life”, using timeless varieties of landscape, still life and interiors to comment on present issues. He has family connections with the Middlesbrough area. Members of his father’s family have lived in Middlesbrough since the early 20th century and he remembers first visiting the city as a child during the Second World War.

Specifically for mima, he has curated a selection of his drawings. For him drawing is an inherent part of his work – a way to order his responses and senses, like a diary. Although these may begin as sketches for much larger paintings, within the context of this exhibition they represent another side to the artist’s practice. They are his immediate response to a view, an experience.

mima Director, Alistair Hudson, said: “Stephen McKenna’s paintings and drawings are a highly refined and skilful tool for us to see and understand the world differently. Whilst accessible as clear representations of things, they are also challenging; allegorical and political; talking to us about the world we live in and our place in it, with humanity and its constructions as a vital part of the natural world. It is a poignant body of work, further enriched by the inclusion of his drawings, connecting perfectly with our local industrial and cultural history.”

Visitors can see the paintings and drawings organised thematically into four separate galleries, with gallery one containing portraits of cities; Berlin, London, Dublin, Derry, Porto and Selinunte, in differing states of splendour or decay. Galleries two and three show interiors, studios, buildings and still life as well as landscapes, trees, rivers, the sea and ports respectively. Finally the fourth gallery is devoted to drawings and watercolours, which cover many aspects of the artist’s work not shown in the selection of paintings; including portraits of people and animals, narrative figure compositions, and some quotations from art history and mythology.

Curator of the show, Alix Collingwood, said: “In our selection of drawings for this exhibition we have been careful to introduce new subject matter not seen in the paintings, presenting a unique insight into this less familiar part of McKenna’s practice.”