Ian McKeever - Henge Paintings

With a career spanning more than five decades, Ian McKeever is one of Britain’s most senior artists working on the international stage. This publication documents the Henge paintings – a 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 artist’s 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 4500 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.’ McKeever’s 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 colour, texture and abstraction can converse with three-dimensional space, form and materiality. The relationship between painting and sculpture in McKeever’s work is discussed by means of an in-conversation between the artist and Dr Jon Wood. ‘My interest in alluding to early megalithic sites in titling the group of paintings Henge paintings,’ says McKeever, ‘was in touching that deeper sense of time, time’s weight, so to