Ian McKeever - Against Architecture

British artist Ian McKeever has been working on the international stage for more than five decades. This, his latest publication, documents Against Architecture - an exhibition that had its first incarnation, curated by Robin Klassnik, at Matt’s Gallery, London (5 February to 19 March 2017) before being reconceived and presented as Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery, Arts University Bournemouth (3 November 2023 to 18 January 2024), curated by Violet M McClean as part of TheGallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. McKeever was made an AUB Honorary Fellow in 2002 and launched TheGallery’s text + work program in 2004.

The exhibition was McKeever’s first foray into installation art, seeking to explore the relationships between his photo/painted panels and the physical spaces in which they are presented. For this, along with a team of helpers and student volunteers, he built a structure with 3 x 2-inch stud walling timbers and sheets of plasterboard comprising myriad walls, passageways, openings, ledges, and platforms, challenging the conventional white cube gallery space and bringing the viewer’s body into heightened dialogue with both their surroundings and the artworks. The works, a series of the acclaimed artist’s abstract paintings combined with ostensibly abstract photographs, pose formal and theoretical questions about perception, visual languages and modes of representation--ideas explored in an essay by Berlin-based English arts writer Mark Prince.

The publication features numerous other text contributions: an introduction by Professor Paul Gough, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, AUB; Sue Hubbard, poet, novelist, and art critic; Violet M McClean, Curator at TheGallery, AUB; photography graduate Eliza Naden; interior architecture and design graduate Milly Louise Harvey; Associate Professor Dominic Shepherd, AUB; and Ian McKeever himself. Along with illustrations of the artist’s past exhibitions and examples of his works of art, special attention is given to documentation of both iterations of the Against Architecture exhibition, including newly commissioned photographs of Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery by Eliza Naden. The publication, which has been edited by Violet M McClean and Millie Lake, and designed by Warin Wareesangtip, has been produced in an edition of 1000 copies.