The Telegraph reports on the death of Michael Kidner, a pioneer of Op Art, who died over Christmas at the age of 92:
(credit: Olivia Coles)
He produced landscapes, still lifes and abstract images in a variety of styles, from realistic depiction to geometric abstraction. When he exhibited at the Bear Lane gallery, Oxford, in 1964, Edwin Mullins in The Sunday Telegraph noted that “one becomes visually hypnotised into imagining one is gazing, say, up at the vaulting of a cathedral”.
Unusually for an artist, Kidner took an interest in scientific thought, and read widely on such subjects as mathematics and Big Bang theory; in the 1960s his work became more systematic, as he brought an almost scientific approach to his exploration of colour and form. At the same time he drew inspiration from the notion of chaos.
His preoccupation with colour and how it is perceived by the eye derived from Seurat and the neo-Impressionists; Kidner believed that optics presented artists with the kind of challenge facing the 15th-century painters who had grappled with perspective.
