Anna Kiff in conversation with Timothy Hyman RA
Autumn Term, sees the return of the Royal Drawing School series of Creative Conversations; online dialogues between artists, curators and writers. Curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, lectures are held Wednesday evenings live on Zoom.
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The paintings, drawings and graphic work of Ken Kiff RA (1935-2001) are among the most rewarding in all post-1960 British Art. Recent attention has focused chiefly on The Sequence - about 200 acrylic-on-paper images, mostly small in scale. The artist’s daughter Anna Kiff has taken charge of his estate since 2015; she has a special interest in his unpublished books of drawings and writings. She will be in dialogue with the painter Timothy Hyman, who first met Kiff in the 1970s, and who wrote a catalogue essay for his Serpentine retrospective in 1986. That has remained Kiff's only substantial London public gallery showing; another seems long overdue.
A wide-ranging conversation will explore, for example, the tension between the ’narrative' aspect of Kiff’s imagery, and his preferred emphasis on what he called 'the forming’. What both speakers are agreed on, is to aim for a dialogue about drawing, because Kiff is a very linear artist.
Talking with a Psychoanalyst: Night Sky, 1973-9 Acrylic- on -paper (Sequence no.113) , Ken Kiff. © Estate of Ken Kiff.
Anna Kiff (b.1968) studied Literature and Philosophy at Manchester University in 1989, trained as a traditional Chinese acupuncturist in 1993 and subsequently set up her own practise. In 2001 she studied Fine Art at Central St Martins, specializing in sculpture (her dissertation was on Jackson Pollock, Rebecca Warren and Eva Hesse); and in 2015 she took over the running of her father’s estate.
Timothy Hyman RA (b.1946) was trained as a painter at the Slade. As well as ten London solo shows, he has exhibited widely, and his work is in many public collections. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2011.
In 1979 he curated Narrative Paintings (Arnolfini and ICA) which included ten of Kiff’s Sequence paintings, as well as a wall of his Street Drawings. He was lead curator for Tate’s Stanley Spencer retrospective. Thames and Hudson have published his 3 books: on Bonnard, on Sienese Painting, and more recently, The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century, which includes a section on Kiff.
Walking (the Dead Father), 1972 Acrylic-on paper (Sequence no. 35), Ken Kiff. © Estate of Ken Kiff.