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 centred on 'The Sequence' — around 200 small-scale acrylic-on-paper works.
Since 2015, the artist’s daughter, Anna Kiff, has overseen his estate. She has a particular interest in his unpublished books of drawings and writings. Here, she's in conversation with painter Timothy Hyman, who first met Kiff in the 1970s and wrote the catalogue essay for his Serpentine retrospective in 1986.
Their wide-ranging discussion explores, among other themes, the tension between the narrative aspect of Kiff’s imagery and his own emphasis on what he called “the forming”. Both speakers are especially keen to focus on drawing, reflecting Kiff’s fundamentally linear approach.
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 practice. In 2001 she studied Fine Art at Central St Martins, specialising 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 (1946-2024) was trained as a painter at the Slade. As well as ten London solo shows, he exhibited widely and his work is in many public collections. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2011.
In 1979, Timothy Hyman 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.