Michael James Kidner RA (1917–2009) was a pioneer of Optical Art in the mid1960s. Early in his career, before evolving his own distinctive style, he was taken with abstract expressionism and Mark Rothko in particular. A few of his works from this period were direct homages to Rothko.
Both rational and playful, his art has combined visual responses to the principles of mathematics, science and chaos theories with an abiding interest in the irrational and unpredictable nature of the human condition. Optics presented Kidner with a challenge in his pursuit of a pure form of imagery, seeking a phenomenological approach to the fluctuating effects of light and colour within the space set by the canvas. He has said: “Unless you read a painting as a feeling, you don’t get anything at all.”
His distinguished career included many honours, influential teaching posts, international group shows and one-man exhibitions in Britain, Eastern Europe, Brazil, Austria and Scandinavia. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2004.
“I was first introduced to Michael Kidner in London as a teenager in the late 1960s. My father was a keen follower, friend and collector of the British Constructivists, and Michael Kidner had a close affinity with many of the artists in the group: Mary and Kenneth Martin, Anthony Hill, John Ernest and Victor Pasmore. I remember visiting Michael’s magnificent house in Hampstead filled with his stunning paintings and hanging out with his son Simon, who tragically died in a motorbike accident at the age of nineteen. Though my business relationship with him was in the last part of his life, his work influenced my own concepts of abstraction and resonated from a young age.
We are delighted that this major retrospective exhibition, featuring paintings spanning Kidner’s entire career, from the 1950s to just a few years before his death in 2009, will be shown in Latvia for the first time. Daugavpils-born Mark Rothko’s colour-field abstractions had a defining effect on Kidner’s practice in his early career, an influence that is evident throughout the paintings on display in this exhibition, most directly in Kidner’s 1956 homage to the artist, but also in the paintings created in subsequent years when Kidner had begun to see colour as “pure sensation”.
Kidner believed that the colour within a painting had the intrinsic power to evoke an emotional response in the viewer: “Unless you read a painting as a feeling, you don’t get anything at all.” This belief began what became a career-long preoccupation with unique and dynamic colour combinations and extensive investigations into the science of linear perspective, and how we optically process colour and light. This would later be labelled Op Art, short for Optical Art, of which Kidner is widely considered to be the British pioneer.
Much of Kidner’s most celebrated work is based around optical effects and systemic structures, each work featuring meticulously mapped out lines, waves and intersections, executed with hard edges and precisely mixed saturated colour. The dizzying patterns he created at once feel ordered and chaotic as the eye dances to focus. Kidner would often say that these works could reveal vital truths about human life and the underlying order of the universe.
Prior to his career as an artist, Kidner studied History and Anthropology at Cambridge. Although his practice was predominantly driven by order and rationality, symbolising his view that reason would solve personal and social issues, he recognised that human nature was often unruly and irrational. By inviting indeterminate and chance elements into his methods when creating his mature work, he created paintings that expressed the fluctuating order of the natural world. This link between the principles of science and mathematics to anthropology and morality is vital when considering the work of Michael Kidner. Never seeing himself as a scientist or mathematician, Kidner embraced fundamental mysteries, approaching his subject matters with endless curiosity and the sensibility of a truly creative and exceptional artist. This defiant curiosity continued throughout his entire career, which spanned over half a century, and despite progressive Cerebella Ataxia, which left him unable to walk, Kidner continued to work in his studio until a month before his death at the age of 92.
Kidner had significant gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the UK and Europe, including a particularly memorable exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1984. I started formally working with him in 2003, having previously included him in two major surveys of British abstract painting, with the exhibition Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, followed by several exhibitions until his death in 2009, including a major retrospective No Goals in a Quicksand in 2007. Michael would be so proud to see his work at the Rothko Centre, and I am indebted to curator Farida Zaletilo’s vision in bringing his work to Daugavpils, where the audience will no doubt find their own ways to contextualise his paintings.”
Matthew Flowers