Ian McKeever - Against Architecture

Documentation of McKeever's first foray into installation art, seeking to explore the relationships between his photo/painted panels and the physical spaces in which they are presented.

British artist Ian McKeever has been working on the international stage for more than five decades. This, his latest publication, documents Against Architecture - an exhibition that had its first incarnation, curated by Robin Klassnik, at Matt's Gallery, London (5 February to 19 March 2017) before being reconceived and presented as Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery, Arts University Bournemouth (3 November 2023 to 18 January 2024), curated by Violet M McClean as part of TheGallery's twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. McKeever was made an AUB Honorary Fellow in 2002 and launched TheGallery's text + work program in 2004.

The exhibition was McKeever's first foray into installation art, seeking to explore the relationships between his photo/painted panels and the physical spaces in which they are presented. For this, along with a team of helpers and student volunteers, he built a structure with 3 x 2-inch stud walling timbers and sheets of plasterboard comprising myriad walls, passageways, openings, ledges, and platforms, challenging the conventional white cube gallery space and bringing the viewer's body into heightened dialogue with both their surroundings and the artworks. The works, a series of the acclaimed artist's abstract paintings combined with ostensibly abstract photographs, pose formal and theoretical questions about perception, visual languages and modes of representation--ideas explored in an essay by Berlin-based English arts writer Mark Prince.

The publication features numerous other text contributions: an introduction by Professor Paul Gough, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, AUB; Sue Hubbard, poet, novelist, and art critic; Violet M McClean, Curator at TheGallery, AUB; photography graduate Eliza Naden; interior architecture and design graduate Milly Louise Harvey; Associate Professor Dominic Shepherd, AUB; and Ian McKeever himself. Along with illustrations of the artist's past exhibitions and examples of his works of art, special attention is given to documentation of both iterations of the Against Architecture exhibition, including newly commissioned photographs of Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery by Eliza Naden. The publication, which has been edited by Violet M McClean and Millie Lake, and designed by Warin Wareesangtip, has been produced in an edition of 1000 copies.

Ian McKeever (b.1946, Withernsea, Yorkshire) is an artist living and working in Hartgrove, Dorset. McKeever has received numerous awards including the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin 1989/90 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2003. He has held several teaching positions including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. He has also published many texts on painting. His work is represented in collections including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

Recent public solo exhibitions include Ian McKeever / Tony Cragg - Painting and Sculpture, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020); Paintings 1992-2018, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK (2018); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark (2015); Between Darkness and Light, National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (2015); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne, Germany (2014); and Hartgrove. Malerei und Fotografie, Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2012).

Mark Prince is an English writer based in Berlin. He writes about contemporary art for publications including Art Monthly and the Times Literary Supplement. Prince has lectured on the Art Writing and Curating BA and MA courses at Goldsmiths and Central St Martins. His essays and poems have featured in multiple monographs, journals, and periodicals.

Violet M McClean is TheGallery's Curator at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB). With an MA in Museum & Gallery Studies from the University of Southampton, she has worked closely with AUB to establish TheGallery as a leading university gallery with an international reputation and extensive programme of exhibitions, events and publications.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. Twice winner of the London Writers Competition and winner of third prize in the National Poetry Competition, her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), The Idea of Islands: a collaboration with the artist Donald Teskey (Occasional Press, Ireland). Twenty of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000: an Anthology (Carcanet) and, as the Poetry Society's only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London's largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo. Her poems have been read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row and appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer and numerous magazines and anthologies and have been recorded for the Poetry Archive.
Her prose and novels include Rothko's Red: short stories (Salt), Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press). Her third novel, Rainsongs, is published by Duckworth, UK, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China.

As an art critic she has written regularly for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, Time Out, The New Statesman and many leading art magazines. Her selected art writings Adventures in Art is published by Other Criteria.

She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and twice been a Hawthornden Fellow. In 1999 she was awarded a major Arts Council award to finish her second novel.

Paul Gough is a leading UK physiotherapist and founder of the North East's largest independent private physio clinic specialising in helping people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond, to stay active, maintain independence and live free from painkillers. Paul is the weekly health columnist for two big newspapers, has been featured in The Guardian and is regularly heard on the BBC. He is a former professional football physio and has a long track record of helping people to successfully live life less restricted by pain and stiffness.