Exhibitions

Michael Kidner was born in 1917; despite his seniority he is an artist of youthful enthusiasm. He took up painting at a relatively late age, in the 1950s, but quickly made up for lost time, and by the 1960s was successfully exhibiting in Britain and America. He went through a number of influences, including St Ives and Abstract Expressionist painting, and in 1959 took Harry Thubron’s course at Leeds which gave him a Bauhaus grounding in the principles of colour theory.

By the mid-1960s, Kidner was seen as part of the Op Art movement, showed in the famous 'Responsive Eye' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965, and then moved into its successor, Kinetic Art. Thereafter he has primarily been associated with Systems art and with constructivism, showing particularly in Countries where the constructivist tradtition has been strongest, and especially in Germany, Poland and Scandinavia. In the 1970s he began working with computers, concerned to prove that there was still a place for the hand of the artist in the face of increasing technological advance. His move into modelling space in three dimensions led him to work with an increasingly wide range of materials, including elastic cloth, which allowed random effects to enter the work.

In 1995 the Centre for the Study of Sculpture purchased a series of drawings related to one of Kidner's most important motifs: the column. The Column echoes the human figure, and the drawings attempt to chart on paper the movement of three dimensions as they revolve in space.

The exhbition in the Study Galleries related to both a finished body of work, and to ongoing experiments in glazing with colour and in the construction of space, as something fluid and unframed. The works on paper were joined by constructions from the artist's studio, and Kidner made a newwork in situ.

The show and its accompanying published interview mark the artist’s 80th birthday.