2015
Pencil, latex, ink and acrylic on canvas
51 x 46 x 2 cm

Kiaer’s series of works Arretche stems from the time when he was invited to participate in the Biennial in Rennes, France. For this project, Kiaer was preoccupied with buildings by the French architect Louis Arretche (1905–1991) who did most of his building in Rennes, such as the Centre de la télécommunications, La Mabilais.

2020
Acrylic, pencil, bleached cotton, calico, ink-jet print, plexiglass,
cardboard, plastic, paper, foam
Overall dimensions variable
Top painting: 138 x 118 cm; left painting: 130 x 76.5 cm
Bottom painting: 97 x 91.5 cm; model: 26 x 28 x 33 cm
Ink-jet print: 20 x 15 cm

Continuing topics from his previous project Quick City, Kiaer‘s installation Endnote ping, (J-L Cheret) is on the same thematic lines concerning the contemporary philosopher Michael Marder. The small image is from a model made by Jean-Louis Chéret, a 19th century French landscape painter and scenic artist for La Favorite, an opera by Gaetano Donizetti staged in 1875. The image suggests an awareness of tropical plant life that had been made sustainable in Europe through the arrival of new glass-house technology in the mid-19th century. Kiaer combines theatre set models with architectural models, with the notion that plant life is a prompt for radical architecture.
The project’s title Endnote, ping is taken from Samuel Beckett’s short story Ping published in 1966, that alludes to an embodied space where repeated words defy a linear reading in favour of something more spatial, material and rhythmic.

2012
Silkscreen ink, acrylic and pencil on cotton
180 x 120 cm

Utopian ideas of architects and the tragic ending of their careers in connection with political changes are a recurring subject in Kiaer‘s work. Aside from his preoccupation with ideas and concepts of the 18th century French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), whose career has been intermitted by the French Revolution and whose visionary, utopian ideas were born while being in prison, Kiaer studied the work and thinking of the Russian avant-garde architect and painter Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974). Melnikov‘s career as an architect ended in the early 1930s when he refused to conform to the Stalinist architecture. From then on, he lived in his building – the Melnikov house – and worked as a painter until his death.

» Melnikov is exemplary according to Kiaer in part because, in his private studio constructed like a fortress tower, he returned from architecture to painting after the announced end of painting. What would it be to make a painting after painting that would not be a return to what painting was before its purported end? Around the time Malevich was making paintings that effaced the past in the name of a radicaI new beginning, Marcel Duchamp was taking existing objects and designating them as readymade artworks. For Kiaer, to make a painting after painting is to make a painting as a readymade – to take an already existing piece of fabric and pin it to a stretcher, for example, or to hang a piece of card. Just as Duchamp altered his readymades, so Kiaer will sometimes add paint or some faint drawing to those surfaces that already constitute paintings before he begins to work on them. «

Excerpt from: Michael Newman, Models and Fragments: Ian Kiaer‘s Studio, in: Ian Kiaer, exhibition catalog Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2012

Video recommendation: A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists‘ Drawings – Artists‘ Panel Discussion with Ian Kiaer et al. at Modern Art Oxford, 2018