Michael Kidner

Circle After Image, 1961

Michael Kidner’s œuvre, created in the course of some five decades, ranks among the most consistent British positions of sensitive, experimental constructivism. The starting point for the artist is a rationally founded, serial, systematic approach which always remains open for intuitively developed derivations from sensibly controlled perception. Kidner was already 36 years old when he began to concentrate on painting exclusively. In the 1950s, an important station was André Lhote’s studio in Paris. Incisive encounters for Kidner with American Abstract Expressionism and Hard Edge were staged at the London Tate Gallery in 1956 and 1959. Since the end of the 1950s Kidner has been working on the series of the so-called ›after-images‹. These ›after-images‹ – represented in the physiological phenomenon of the after-image on the retina – are precise pictorial trans-formations of this rational treatment of the subconscious. The artist concentrates on the basic forms of circle and rectangle and, using this vocabulary, plays with the different projection processes of image and after-image.