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71 John Kingerlee (b.1936) Grid - Kilcatherine (2007)signed, titled & dated 2007 on reverse
oil on board
25.40 x 61cm (10 x 24in)
Provenance:
Private Collection
Exhibited:
Picked for USA tour ‘John Kingerlee’ by former New York Times art critic William Zimmer whiched exhibited in
sixteen cities across the US between 2007 and 2010.
€6,000-9,000 (£5,217-7,826)
Grid Kilcatherine toured American museums for three years as part of a major John Kingerlee retrospective. The grid series repre-
sents the summation of this distinguished artist’s career, appealing to major collectors and critics across the globe. The series began
in 1996 following a trip to the ancient burial mound of Tara near the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland. The experience gave
Kingerlee a profound sense of ancient power and our ancestors’ attempts to preserve an awareness of this within the landscape.
Eventually the artist distilled these thoughts and feelings into an innovative group of landscape paintings that became known as the
grids, in which he adapted the cellular web of the Cubists and applied it to timeless elemental settings.
The grids have also been dubbed pneumas, from the ancient Greek word for breath or, when used in a religious context, spirit or soul.
For the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximenes, pneuma was the primary substance from which all things are made. In the hands of
the painter, oil pigment is the medium from which his subject must be brought to life, and Kingerlee’s approach with his rows of dis-
solving ‘plaques’ stresses both repetition and coherence. His fundamental belief is that all things in the universe are linked, they are
parts of an overriding unity, hence in a work such as the present one there is a strong sense of continuation into infinity: the breadth
and depth of the composition are not limited by the confines of the picture frame.
The multi-layered surfaces of the grids are themselves evocative of geological or archaeological strata, with the upper ‘crust’ hiding
numerous earlier manifestations of the painting (some in bright primary colours), whilst at the same time respecting that evolution
by allowing the textured build-up of pigment to push through the upper skin.
The process of accumulation and reduction to which each grid is subjected is a metaphor for the processes of nature - birth, growth,
germination, disintegration, and regeneration. The artist is acutely aware of these cycles, living as he has done on the exposed west
coast of Ireland for over thirty-five years, observing the weathering effects of wind and the erosion of the coast by heavy seas. The
light too changes constantly in this primordial setting, revealing and concealing, the very edge of the land intensifying one’s aware-
ness of it as the eye is drawn by the huge dome of the sky.
In Kilcatherine Grid two rows of five plaques seem to hang suspended in pale blue space. Each one could be a landscape or seascape
in its own right, some even evoke suggestions of faces through the smears of paint and the drier accretions of impasto. Dissolution
and break-up are, however, held in check by a sense of order that is manifested in the artist’s reliance on symmetry and balance.
The spaces between the plaques form a row of four linked crosses, their edges blurred to a greater or lesser extent so as to suggest
that this colour not only separates but also forms a background to the plaques, like stones projecting above the surface of the sea or
clouds scattered across the sky - each element animated, of course, by pneuma.
Jonathan Benington, October 2016