Alastair mackinven biography sample

By Alex Greenberger. Senior Editor, ARTnews.

Alastair MacKinven ( – January ) was a British visual artist based in London working on figurative painting and portraiture, film, and performance.

Alastair Mackinven , an artist whose work presented viewers with confusing, hypnotic imagery that begged viewers to reconsider the world around them, has died at He battled a long illness, his London-based gallery Maureen Paley said in its announcement on Wednesday. Within the British art scene, Mackinven built a modest but loyal fan base.

He initially gained a name for his cryptic performances, some of which he captured on film. Then, over the course of the last decade, he amassed a critical following for paintings that tested the limits of figuration. Few overarching thematic concerns bound the whole of his practice, with works that variously considered spiritual renewal, the commodification of art, and the formal properties of paintings.

Mainly, he seemed to want to surprise his viewers. Painting is a deep space. By that point, Mackinven had begun working almost exclusively as a painter, creating hazy images of people melting away into psychedelically colored spaces. But he started out in a very different vein. The year afterward, he staged a performance called Cut Off My Hand to Spite My Cock , for which he glued one of his hands to the floor of the Camden Arts Centre, then waited to see whether any staff on hand would help him.

As a musician, Mackinven was a longtime guitarist for Scottish art-punk band Country Teasers, formed in Edinburgh in the mid-nineties.

He then began to exhibit paintings, something that spurred many critics to term him a painter around the time of his Institute of Contemporary Arts London show. Yet he said was never totally comfortable with that classification. Alastair Mackinven was born in in Clatteridge, England. The band has put out a range of albums, the most recent of which was released in