Peter Kinley: abstracting the real

Peter Kinley was born in Vienna in 1926. He arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1938 and served in the British army between 1944-48. He studied at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, and at St Martin’s School of Art, London. Kinley’s first solo exhibition was held in London in1954, following which he showed with regularity at galleries in both America Europe, India and Australia. In 1982 a retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. He taught as Senior Lecturer at Bath Academy of Art from 1971-1975, and then as Principal Lecturer 1975-1988. Kinley died shortly after retiring from his Corsham post in 1988.

Kinley’s art has always been held in the highest regard by his fellow artists and curators and his works are represented in the major British public collections. In his 2010 joint monograph on the artist (Peter Kinley, Lund Humphries, Farnham) Marco Livingstone wrote ‘Kinley was a painter of invention and self-renewal but also of extraordinary patience, producing pictures marked by their serenity while calmly and subtly expanding on a range of themes and methods over a period of some 35 years up to his death from cancer in September 1988. Distancing himself by 1960 from artistic fashions and favouring time less imagery conveyed in fresh layers of paint, he trod a solitary path that has made him difficult to place but that conversely has ensured for his art an aesthetic longevity.’

This exhibition includes major works from all four decades of the artists career and is accompanied by a fully illustrated colour catalogue containing an insightful essay by the historian Philip Wright, placing Kinley’s work in both a European and American context.