Ken Kiff (1935-2001)

Among celebrated British artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Ken Kiff displayed one of the most individual and distinctive styles. His paintings and drawings, created in a wide variety of media, are characterized by radiant colour and fantastic flights of the imagination, which in recent years have gained renewed attention in the context of contemporary figurative painting.

Born in Dagenham, Essex, in 1935. Kiff’s childhood during the second world war was heavily impacted by the loss of his father who was killed in London when he was 6 years old. The effects of these traumatic years are inevitably reflected in the style and imagery of much of his work. After leaving school, he continued his studies at the Hornsey School of Art, and subsequently taught part-time at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where he influenced a generation of students.

Kiff was elected Royal Academician in 1991, and was Associate Artist at the National Gallery 1991–93. Unafraid to hold a somewhat solitary position, his commitment to the pictorial values of modernism and his deep respect for artists such as Klee and Miro, meant that his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. He saw colour in terms of images, and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, “the natural complexity of painting’. Images that came to form his personal iconography arose from his imagination, out of the stuff of painting, and his intimate relationship with technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of paintings’ structure. During the 1980s his range of media expanded to include almost every printmaking technique. Collaborating with master printmakers from the UK, Europe and America, numerous editions were published.

Having come to prominence in the 1980s, Kiff was first represented by Nicola Jacobs Gallery, moving to Fisher Fine Art in 1987, and Marlborough Fine Art in 1990 where he and, since 2001, his Estate remained until 2020. Under Anna Kiff’s tenure since 2016, the Estate is currently working with multiple galleries including Carl Freedman in Margate, with a solo exhibition from November 2022-February 2023, and Albertz Benda in New York who will stage a group show centred around the artist June 2023.

Alongside many exhibition catalogues and other publications that feature Kiff’s work, in 2001, he was the subject of a major monograph written by Norbert Lynton and Andrew Lambirth, published by Thames and Hudson. A complete bibliography is available upon request or at the artist’s website.

Kiff’s work can be found in major public collections, including Tate, The British Museum, The British Council and Arts Council Collection in the UK, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ackland Museum (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), Cleveland Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum in the US. It has also been exhibited in New York at MoMA (1981), Edward Thorp Gallery (1982 & 1986), and Pamela Auchincloss Gallery (1990), in Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1982) and in Washington DC at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1984), and worldwide.

Notable solo shows in the UK include Talbot Rice Art Centre, Edinburgh (1981), Serpentine Gallery, London (1986), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (1986). More recently, his painting cycle The Sequence was presented at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, November 2018–April 2019, a solo exhibition at Turps Gallery London, June–July 2019. His work was also the focus of a 2017 exhibition at Frieze Masters in the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge. This recent revival in interest in Kiff’s work has been driven, in part, by the work undertaken in recent years by the Estate to reposition his artistic legacy.