Ian McKeever Henge Paintings [Paperback]

McKeevers Henge paintings inaugurate a deliberately measured engagement with time, gravity, and material space, presenting a decisive, concentrated inquiry into how abstraction embodies monumental presence within a sparse, resonant visual language.With a career spanning more than five decades, Ian McKeever is one of Britains most senior artists working on the international stage. This, his latest publication, documents the Henge paintingsa series started in 2017 and completed over the course of five years, inspired by prehistoric standing stones in the county of Wiltshire, England, and continuing the artists long-standing investigation into the languages and possibilities of abstract painting.Comprising thirty paintings along with numerous works on paper, the genesis of the series was a visit by McKeever to the world-famous neolithic site in the village of Avebury in 2016, where he took black and white photographs of the large stones that form three discrete circles: two smaller ones contained within the largest. Erected some 4,500 years ago, Avebury is the largest stone circle in Britain, and forms part of what English Heritage asserts to be a set of neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial sites that seemingly formed a vast sacred landscape. Art historian and curator Paul Moorhouse, in his essay commissioned for the publication, describes how McKeever framed each megalith in close-up, their edges visible at the extremity of the resulting images, explaining how the experience of moving around Avebury and responding to the huge stones monumental presence made an abiding impression that resonated with deep-seated preoccupations. McKeevers resulting body of work is an earnest and considered exploration into how paint can convey universal forces and properties such as mass, gravity, and time, and how color, texture, and abstraction can converse with three-dimensional space, form, and materiality.The relationship between painting and sculpture in McKeeversl£!