To celebrate the life and work of one of the most distinctive British artists of the late 20th century, London gallery Three Highgate presents Ken Kiff: A Hundred Suns, an exhibition of paintings, prints, and drawings by the late Ken Kiff (UK, 1935 – 2001).
This important presentation of Kiff’s work takes place in North London, an area with strong psychogeographic ties to the artist. Kiff lived there for many years, and the Gallery, where the exhibition is taking place, is exactly one mile from Hornsey Art School where Kiff studied.
To accompany the exhibition, Three Highgate in collaboration with the Estate of Ken Kiff has published a book of art and poetry, A Hundred Suns. Alongside Kiff’s selected art works, it features poetic works by Frank O’Hara, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kiff’s close friend Martha Kapos, and an essay by the writer and exhibition curator, Alistair Hicks. Kiff considered poetry an extremely important art form and created a number of specific paintings in homage to it. This includes the 1977 seminal canvas, The Poet (Mayakovsky), which is the cornerstone of this exhibition and which was kindly lent to the show by John Talbot, a major collector of Ken Kiff ́s work.
Kiff had similar aspirations in his art to poetry and would have agreed with Gaston Bachelard’s dictum that ‘The poet does not describe, he exalts.’ Kiff uses paints as the poets use words. Pushing his blocks of colour together, shifting them around until they blur and rhyme. As with poets, the technique and understanding of the language are but tools to reach another place. ‘Fantasy,’ Kiff said, ’is a way of thinking about reality.’
Growing up during the Second World War at a time of great conflict and upheaval, Kiff sometimes was accused by his contemporaries of being solipsistic. But far from it – Kiff had strong views on the era’s political and social complexities, and careful examination can see them mirrored in his art. But Kiff’s art was also visionary. While not overtly spiritual, he desired to link the inner world with the outer world, the unconscious with the conscious, in what he regarded ‘a constellation of mental activity’.
To advance this complex task, Kiff created his own inspired language of expression. His repeated symbols and imagery are not just expressions of the subconscious. He observed and constructed them very carefully, morphing content, colour and form – the colour yellow, the sun, the shadows, the body as a landscape, for example. He put a lot of work into developing this language, using all possible sources in this pursuit. His interest and involvement in Jungian therapy is as likely to have been driven by his academic and intellectual need to finesse his visionary language as by seeking therapy to address psychological issues. The same applies to his attention to repeated imagery in his dreams, to his study of the archetypes in fairy tales and mythologies, and his knowledge of the work and symbols of poets such as Mallarme and Mayakovsky.
This may explain why Kiff’s art could be so polarising. Those who do not understand his language may see his work as childish. Those who do – appreciate the sophistication and complexity of his art and the tremendous difficulty of the task undertaken by him.
Commenting on the exhibition, Irina Johnstone, the founder of Three Highgate, says, “Ken’s artwork stands for imagination and fantasy – but there is nothing whimsical in it. There is a lot of humour in his work which brings out the incongruity and sometimes the grotesqueness in life. Andrew Lambirth said about Kiff ́s paintings that they are ́everyday invaded by the unknown ́. But this is not a menacing or threatening unknown – there is a strong hint of yellow, of optimism and faith.”
To Kiff, one of the defining features of the 20th century was the choice of materials used. Be it the traditional oil paint on canvas or the hardboard background favoured by Kiff, it was the painterly brushmark that was of the utmost importance. Likewise it was the paint and not only the subject-matter that was key for Kiff, with colour having its own independent status and being frequently the initial inspirational and exploratory starting point. There is an acute energy to his work, with subject, line and surface borne out of this vigour, culminating in works that are in their very creation intensely personal.
Kiff, who was born in Dagenham, East London, studied at Hornsey Art School and subsequently taught at both Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He gained recognition as an artist in the 1980s and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1991. He was also Associate Artist in Residence at the National Gallery from 1991 until 1993. Painting, to him, was one of the most vital of the media. It was the Modernist giants of Picasso, Klee, and Miró who, for Kiff, remained artistic touchstones throughout his life. Focusing on the evolution of the Modernist movement against the backdrop of the Western painting tradition with its Eastern influences, Kiff deemed them, ‘The ones that had mined the deepest were the ones looking furthest into the future.’
Kiff’s work was often an intensely laborious affair, leading him to revisit and reconsider his unfinished works for many months or even years before completing them. This process took on the guise of an intimate dialogue, during which the painting, constantly developing and changing, unhurriedly revealed itself to Kiff. It was only through this prolonged looking that Kiff felt it was possible to see that which was ‘virtually incommunicable’ in an artwork. In a similar vein it takes time and patience for the viewer to uncover the meanings of Kiff’s work rather than a few brief seconds spent scanning the surface. As Kiff considered it, ‘So, is there enough in the painting for it to unfold, and to continue unfolding, over the years? I think this is a fascinating question, because there is the unfolding in the sense of further thought or form becoming apparent, but there is also the unfolding of the incomprehensible rightness of the forms, even when these defy further thought.’
Kiff’s works are included in many national and international collections, such as: The Arts Council England, UK; The British Museum, UK; Royal Academy of Arts, UK; Tate, UK; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; The Cleveland Museum of Art, USA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA; the Museum of Modern Art, USA, and many others.
