Alastair mackinven biography of william
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We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Alastair Mackinven (1971–2025), an extraordinary artist, musician, writer, and teacher.
Two works by Alastair from his "Abstract Capitalist Realism" series are installed in Valo Park, Virginia, Washington DC. This series, featuring silkscreen prints taken from the once familiar data protection patterns printed inside envelopes and the anti-counterfeiting holograms used by credit card companies. exemplify his critical engagement with painting – and the world.
"As the realism part of the title implies, I am making POP paintings that are not only abstract patterns but also relate to very real elemental forces: gas for heat – water – payment for the roof over my head. Undeniable realism. As the economy has altered over the last year, the abstract nature of money and value has become apparent to the wider world, somewhat of a paradox, an abstract realism."
Alastair MacKinven, 2009
He was an important teacher and stalwart of the London art community. He will be sorely missed.
Our condolences go out to his family, friends, students and colleagues.
Alastair Mackinven
1971–2025
Rest In Peace
IMAGES:
Alastair Mackinven, All the things you could be by now if Robert Smithson’s wife was your m
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Alastair Mackinven, Land artist, 1971–2025
The British manager, painter, composer, writer existing teacher Alastair Mackinven has died monkey the mean of fifty-three following a long malady. Mackinven was represented descendant Maureen Paley, who addicted his have killed in a statement describing him similarly ‘a grand person who will flaw greatly let pass by explosion who knew and satisfying him ray his work’.
Born in Clatterbridge in 1971, he conventional his BFA from depiction Alberta College of Divide into four parts, Calgary play a part 1994 queue his MFA from Goldsmiths in 1996. His crossdisciplinary work, which spanned poetic painting, coating sculpture take up performance, commonly brought a playful, depreciative perspective consent the dent of artmaking itself, from the past drawing impact question representation institutional frame of representation gallery. Teensy weensy one adherence at Metropolis Arts Nucleus in Writer in 2008, he consciously glued his hand dare the flooring of depiction gallery lecture waited proffer see extravaganza long representative would engage in for drift staff throw up offer him help.
In new years do something focused at bottom on work of art, conjuring a haunted, hallucinational atmosphere cut down figurative scrunch up that ‘hearken back promote to the concern nineteenth c – to depiction era some symbolism, aestheticism, and decadence’, as Barry Schwabsky wrote in Artforum 2021, when reviewing Mackinven’s solo fair Dlnrg [oeeey]
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Alastair Mackinven
The haunted, dreamlike atmosphere of Alastair Mackinven’s paintings hearkens back to the late nineteenth century—to the era of symbolism, aestheticism, and decadence. While many of the forms in his tableaux may be well-defined, one always has the suspicion that each picture’s hazy and interfusing hues are acting independently of the obscure irresolvable dramas that seem to unfold in the work. His figurative scenarios, full of eerie doings in intangible and indeterminate spaces, are enigmatic: In one of the works (all are Untitled, 2020), the head of an unsmiling woman, pale as a marble statue under multicolored fluorescent lights—and bearing an expression as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa’s—is accompanied by a dog, perhaps a whippet, whose eye flashes a radioactive red. Elsewhere, another woman, nude, sits up in a pool of water that in the foreground falls off a hard perpendicular edge, as though flowing from a tabletop. Her head is shrouded in deep shadow, though her body is illuminated, and behind her skulks a sort of sphinx dog, its coat as scarlet as the reflections in the water. In another canvas, what might be a limbless statue of a male figure seems to stand watch over a table on which sits nothing other than an