KIM KEEVER, Abstract 52486, 2020
Our featured artwork this week is a new photographic work by contemporary American photographer, Kim Keever. An acclaimed artist, Keever is best known for his large-scale images capturing vibrantly colored billows of paint as they swirl together in a 200-gallon tank. He creates mystical and lush abstractions, capturing a variety of moments when colors entertwine underwater. Deviating from his iconic candy colors, Abstract 52486 features a more sophisticated and nuanced soft palette of pale pink, apricot and cream. The folds of the paint, capturing a cool blueish light from the exterior, add in subtle tones of violet and periwinkle to give an almost iridescent glimmer to the image.
A graduate in Thermal Engineering from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA Keever was briefly a thermal engineer working primarily on NASA projects but changed careers in the late 1970s to become a full-time artist. Despite the switch, he has always drawn on his original vocation by retaining a scientific and innovative process in his artistic work
Keever first used a water tank to create landscape imagery, which at first glance are redolent of the Hudson River School and the German Romantic painters. In fact, they are detailed scenes that he built himself by placing objects in a 200-gallon tank. He then dropped a small amount of paint, initially just to create the impression of clouds. He became increasingly interested in the random nature of the addition of paint and in 2013 abandoned landscapes to concentrate solely on abstract images.
Recent exhibitions of Kim Keever’s work in the US include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut and Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa. Internationally he has shown at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, Berlin; Kallmann-Museum Ismaning, Museum Haus Ludwig Saarlouis, Stadtgalerie Kiel, 2019; and Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung in Berlin, 2020. Kim Keever’s work can be found in numerous important public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn.
Waterhouse & Dodd has represented Kim Keever since 2013. In addition to hosting highly successful solo shows of his work in New York, the gallery has exhibited his work in London and at art fairs throughout the United States and in Europe. The gallery has placed his work in many collections in the United States and also in South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia.
Kim Keever lives and works in Miami, Florida.