Michael Kidner, R.A.

The Artist
Private Collection, U.K., from whom acquired by the present owner

London, Serpentine Gallery, Michael Kidner, Painting Drawing and Sculpture 1959-84, 4th November - 2nd December 1984, cat. no.7, with Arts Council tour to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (as Circle after Image, lent by the Artist).

Original canvas. There are some extremely minor instances of very light studio detritus and surface dirt, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light revels a couple of instances of fluorescence and possible retouching to the top left edge, in the orange, and a further, smaller spot to the lower left edge in the white. These have all been very sensitively executed. There are further areas of fluorescence to the white which appear in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials. Housed in a thin strip frame. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions or queries regarding the present work.
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Having experimented with a range of subjects, techniques and modes of representation in painting in the 1950s, Michael Kidner’s ‘after image’ canvases of 1960 signalled a move towards his mature style and marked him out as perhaps Britain’s first ‘Op Artist.’ Using ingeniously constructed and highly structured compositions, playing with how the eye is affected by different arrangements of flatly painted fields of colour, he tested the boundaries of visual perception, making the surfaces of his works appear to shimmer, flicker and pulse in a spectrum of disorientating optical effects. As he wrote: ‘Once I realised that my interest in colour rather than figure or landscape could become the subject of a painting, I was off to a new start. An after-image was the purest experience of colour I could recall and because it occurs on the retina of the eye, it looks brighter than the surrounding colour…’(Michael Kidner, ibid., p.10). Kidner was particularly interested in the perception of colour, how the eye translates our experience of the image before us, but also the underlying feeling such an experience draws out in the viewer. He was intrigued by the totality of the viewer’s response, both physiological and emotional. His early optical works were included in the much publicized Responsive Eye exhibition, curated by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, in which examples of Bridget Riley’s early paintings were also exhibited.