Hales Gallery’s forthcoming solo presentation of Ken Kiff (1935-2001) at Independent 20th Century is an important opportunity to reassess the work of one of the most singular artists in late 20th-century Britain. With a focus on paintings and prints related to Kiff’s residency as Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London (1991-93), the presentation expands on the spring 2025 exhibition at Hales London, The National Gallery Project. The selection of works, centered on a major triptych, reveals the extraordinary range of Kiff’s painterly imagination. His intense, searching response to the Old Masters enriched his art for the rest of his life. The residency produced numerous sketches, charcoal and pastel drawings, monoprints and etchings, and inspired 50 new paintings, some of which were still in progress when he died aged 65 in 2001.

Kiff took up residence in a large basement studio at the museum in 1991, the same year he was elected a Royal Academician. At the height of his influence, he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as one of Britain’s foremost postwar artists. He was a highly respected tutor at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and exhibitions in the UK and US throughout the 1980s had established his distinctive oeuvre, yet in many ways he remained outside the mainstream. By the time of his death, his reputation as “a true painter, ever fresh yet firmly rooted in the best traditions” (1) had almost been eclipsed by the conceptualism of the YBAs. Today, however, many aspects of his work that once seemed alien to the dominant critical taste are finding fresh currency with a younger generation of artists, as well as new audiences. 

Few of the works Kiff made as a result of his residency were literal transcriptions of the original paintings; he sought instead to find their essence. Unfettered access to the museum gave him the opportunity to revisit works he already knew, including Giovanni di Paolo’s Saint John the Baptist retiring to the Desert (1454), with its vivid sense of journeying, and Rubens’s An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c. 1636) from which he had previously borrowed the motif of a single tree. Kiff’s drypoint, After Giovanni di Paolo (1993), reimagines the episodic stages of the 15th-century painting with a more secular figure, and incorporates the naturalistic flowers from the side panels of the frame, which were added later. 

Rembrandt, Red Tree and Cloud (1991) illustrates how he sought out specific references that were of significance to him. The image is a refined arrangement of elements: a tree on a hill, a rock protruding from water, a cloud, the fronds of river reeds. Executed in pastel, its green and red palette was a color contrast Kiff found particularly compelling: “the most compact and dynamic of color opposites.” (5) 

As the residency progressed he found other kinds of touchstones. His initial responses to Joachim Patinir’s Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape (c. 1515) made much of the painting’s shadowy drama in a series of charcoal and pastel drawings. But an encaustic work made later in New York, A/6 (2) Untitled - After Patinir (1996), illustrates how he sublimated these starting points into a composition that, while still echoing Patinir’s cave, steps and hills, is defined by the untouched white space in the painting’s upper-right corner. The pastel Hermit (1992), which floats even freer from any kind of attributable pictorial references, also evidences the kind of “organic, interdependent forming” (6) that Kiff aimed for in all his work.