Name Ken Kiff | Education Hornsey College of Art | |
Books Ken Kiff: Recent Work, Ken Kiff: Encaustic Paintings, 1996-1999 : 21 January-14 February 2004 |
Ken Kiff - Art collector John Talbot discusses his collection of Ken Kiff paintings with ArtTop10
Ken Kiff, RA (29 May 1935 – 15 February 2001) an internationally known figurative artist, was born in Dagenham and trained at Hornsey School of Art 1955-61. He came to prominence in the 1980s thanks to the championship of art critic Norbert Lynton, and a cultural climate intent on re-assessing figurative art following the Royal Academy’s ‘New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition in 1981. He started exhibiting at Nicola Jacob’s gallery, moved to Fischer Fine Art in 1987 and finally to the Marlborough Gallery in 1990, by which time he had begun exhibiting internationally and had work in major public collections. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and became Associate Artist at the National Gallery 1991-93. His 30-year teaching career at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College influenced a generation of students.
Contents
- Ken Kiff Art collector John Talbot discusses his collection of Ken Kiff paintings with ArtTop10
- ART REVIEW Ken Kiff The Sequence at the Sainsbury Centre
- Selected Solo Exhibitions
- Selected Group Exhibitions
- References

Despite his success, Kiff’s position was never a comfortable one. His commitment to the pictorial values of modernism, his deep respect for artists such as Klee, Miro or Chagall, and his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. In contemporary debates around abstraction versus figuration he tended to push past the battle-lines: ‘colour thinking’ as opposed to ‘image thinking’, pictorial form versus representational meaning, in order to get at something beneath their seeming differences. Images themselves arose out of the stuff of painting and an intimate relationship with a technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of a painting’s structure. He saw colour in terms of images and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, “the natural complexity of painting”.
Colour and colour relationships interacted in his paintings with a range of images evoking the blissfully radiant and lyrical to the comic and disturbingly grotesque. ‘Fantasy’ as he saw it ‘was a way of thinking about reality’. The matter-of-fact imagery of streets, houses, trees, animals and people was configured with dreamlike encounters and happenings in a way that invited the viewer into an internal world constantly using the external world as its subject-matter.

‘The Sequence’ begun in the 1970s, and by the time of his death, constituting nearly 200 works represented a striking formal innovation. Regarded by Kiff as a single work, it was a series of pictures (acrylic on paper), forming a chain, repeating and developing imagery and colour, and allowing their networks of association to move and develop laterally across many formats, with a single energy carrying them along.

By the late 1980s his range of media had expanded to include woodcuts, monotypes, lithography and etching. He enjoyed how new ways of working with materials, the grain of the wood, for example, or the wax in the encaustics, could extend his visual thinking and force him to make decisions more quickly. He took great pleasure in collaborating with master printmaking technicians such as Dorothea Wight and Mark Balakjian in Britain, Erik Hollgersson in Sweden, and Garner Tullis in the US.

ART REVIEW: Ken Kiff: The Sequence at the Sainsbury Centre
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1979 Gardner Centre Gallery, University of Sussex
1980 Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London
1981 Talbot Rice Art Centre, Edinburgh
1982 Edward Thorp Gallery, New York
1986 Ken Kiff Paintings 1965-85, Serpentine Gallery, London, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
1988 Fischer Fine Art, London
1991 Ken Kiff, Recent Work, Marlborough Fine Art, London
1993-94 Ken Kiff at the National Gallery, London
1996 Marlborough Fine Art & Graphics, London
2001 Retrospective Paintings, Works on Paper, Prints, Marlborough Fine Art, London
2008 Ken Kiff Paintings and Works on Paper, Marlborough Fine Art, London
Selected Group Exhibitions
1970 Critic’s Choice, selected by Norbert Lynton, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
1973 Magic and Strong Medicine, selected by Norbert Lynton, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1979 Narrative Painting, selected by Timothy Hyman, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
1981 New Works on Paper 1, curated by John Elderfield, Museum of Modern Art, New York
1982 Issues: New Allegory 1, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
1983 Alive to it All, Serpentine Gallery, London
1984 The British Art Show, Ikon Gallery and City Gallery Museum, Birmingham
1987 Current Affairs, British Painting and Sculpture in the 80s, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and British Council touring
1989 Tree of Life, Southbank Centre, London, Corner House Gallery, Manchester
1990 Nine Contemporary Painters, A Personal Choice, selected by Andrew Lambirth, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
1994 Here and Now, Serpentine Gallery, London
1997 British Figurative Art, Painting, The Human Figure
2001 Tell me a Picture, selected by Quentin Blake, The National Gallery, London