Tag Archives: Chris Kenny

Chris Kenny: The Flowers That Did In Eden Bloom

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In a series of painstakingly constructed works using found materials (such as text cut from books, maps and abandoned landscape paintings), West London-based artist Chris Kenny examines and muses on the notion of Paradise: our attempt to define it, build it, reach it or perhaps remember it.

Rows of little wooden houses built from abandoned amateur landscape paintings are incised with the names of ideal worlds: Arcadia, Elysium, Utopia. They poignantly demonstrate the common desire to make a heaven on earth, a perfect garden, a harmonious society. Stories assembled from phrases cut from a multitude of books describe places heavenly but sinister, whilst complex floating assemblages of map fragments form circular ‘signs’ for an island or a terminus where the specific and universal are interwoven.

Kenny has exhibited with England & Co for over a decade with six solo shows to date, and has exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Art & Design, New York in their 2009 exhibition Slash: Paper Under the Knife. Kenny’s works have been reproduced in many magazines, exhibition catalogues and books, including You are Here and The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.

More information on Chris Kenny is available from the England & Co website.

Date: 26 April 2014 – 11 May 2014

Location: PM Gallery & House, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, Ealing, London

Cost: Free

Exhibition tour
Saturday 10 May, 2pm
Join us for an informal tour of the exhibition with artist Chris Kenny.
Free – just turn up

 

THOROUGHLY MODERN MAN: Paul Klee, Tate Modern

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In an ideal world you would be able to walk around the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern choosing Christmas presents for your family and friends… the pictures are such desirable objects, almost everybody finds them charming and most pieces would not require more than a single sheet of wrapping paper.

It is the modest scale and sweetness of Klee’s work that has stopped him from being valued as highly as his Modernist contemporaries and yet his imagination and invention surpasses all but a few of them. He was abstract before almost everybody else, he was surreal before the Surrealists and he explored technique for its own sake in a way not seen again until the Minimalists.

The extensive Tate exhibition is a pleasure from start to finish, which is not to say the art lacks darkness; on the contrary, a sense of the sinister or uncanny is present in almost every work on show. Klee’s childlike drawing and paintbox use of colour don’t conceal but rather reveal an extraordinary, elegant and sophisticated personality. He said “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing… ” He would have been 134 years old yesterday.

Paul Klee – Making Visible continues at the Tate Modern until 9 March 2014, more information and book here.

Written by a Thoroughly Modern Man, Chris Kenny.

THOROUGHLY MODERN MAN: Jumpers for Goalposts, Bush Theatre

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Tom Wells’s Kitchen Sink was one of my cultural highlights of 2012, his latest play Jumpers for Goalposts shares some of the atmosphere, issues and humour of the former work. The whole play is set in a very credible changing room; the action takes place after every match played by a somewhat eccentric five-a-side football team.

Wells celebrates the diversity of 21st century human beings. His characters are peculiar. Because we are all peculiar. He closely observes the habits and foibles of his players with hilarious and often touching results.

The complexity of characterisation makes great demands on the cast particularly linguistically. The actors meet these demands and carry one emotionally through the occasional ups and frequent downs of their extraordinary-ordinary lives.

The play advances the task of normalising what once might have been considered unconventional lifestyle choices. It does this without once appearing worthy but by making the audience contort with laughter.

Jumpers for Goalposts continues until 4 January 2014, book here.

Written by a Thoroughly Modern Man, Chris Kenny.