The exhibition will continue until 9 March 2019 at the Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN.  For further information and opening times, see https://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/exhibitions/172/overview/

"A progression from his recent solo exhibition Endnote, tooth at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Ian's new work builds on earlier projects inspired by utopian architectural thought, including that of Frederick Kiesler. The exhibition will feature new paintings, models and inflatable sculpture, extending Ian's enquiries into the history of visionary architecture to propose alternative ways of sensing and rationalising the world around us.

"The exhibition space will feature Ian's recent body of work Endnote, ping (2018). This will include multi-layered paintings comprising of Plexiglas repurposed from London bus shelters laid over delicate watercolour paintings and drawings on paper. Kiaer begins with drawings on which he masks delineated areas of the surface with impermeable materials including varnish, and then floods the exposed areas with acrylic paint. These works are made horizontally, on the studio floor, and are responsive to, and merge with the traces and stains of the street already accrued on the Plexiglas.

"The works in the exhibition are the product of three avenues of enquiry and are, by nature, fragmentary. Firstly, Ian explores West Coast utopian architecture of the 1970s, in particular experimental and temporary structures, such as inflatables and biomorphic constructions proposed in the initiative Quick City, organised by architects Peter de Bretteville and Craig Hodgetts in Los Angeles. Ian sees this as a period during which art and architecture converged to produce more liberated alternatives to the rigid demands of modernism.

"Secondly, Ian relates to the work of the philosopher Michael Marder, a proponent of ‘environmental thought’, which considers plants as living beings that possess their own forms of subjectivity. Marder’s work develops a critique of anthropocentric empathy towards plants, and has been influential to Ian's recent work. In preparation for the exhibition, he has been visiting and making drawings in the prefabricated greenhouses at Oxford Botanic Gardens. Finally, Ian brings these two concerns into relation through fragments from the Samuel Beckett short story, Ping, (1966) an embodied space where repeated words defy a linear reading in favour of something more spatial, material and rhythmic.

"For two decades, Ian has worked with provisional materials including cardboard, foam core, and plastic sheeting to produce paintings and sculptures that rest between chance and intentionality, emphasising qualities of lightness, impermanence and transparency. The apparent vulnerability of his work is indicative of a practice that continually throws the status of the work as art into question."

(Text courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London).