This post was originally published on artnews.com
Alastair Mackinven, an artist whose work presented viewers with confusing, hypnotic imagery that begged viewers to reconsider the world around them, has died at 53. 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.
Recent shows at New York’s Reena Spaulings Fine Art brought him acclaim across the pond as well. In his Artforum review, critic Barry Schwabsky wrote of the colorful canvases on view in a 2021 outing, “These chromatic polymorphous compounds are enormously satisfying, and one comes to wonder whether the paintings’ impenetrable encounters are meant simply to redirect viewers to the nonrepresentational—to send them the long way around, but giving them so much to observe along the way.”
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.
“I don’t see painting as the placing an image on a canvas,” he told Frontrunner in 2020. “This isn’t painting. Painting is a deep space. It’s a process of starting that is followed by a negation of what was just put down as a way to find something that wasn’t anticipated.”
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.
In 2007, for example, he made the film All The Things You Could Be By Now If Robert Smithson’s Wife Was Your Mother, which documented a performance that involved amassing 30,000 pounds of dirt, stripping off his clothes, and moving through a large pipe—a stand-in, he said, for “Nancy Holt’s vagina,” referring to the artist married to the titular Land artist. 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.
He then began to exhibit paintings, something that spurred many critics to term him a painter around the time of his 2008 Institute of Contemporary Arts London show. Yet he said was never totally comfortable with that classification. “I wanted the work to point a finger at the audience and accuse them of being decrepit old spastics who need the aid of grab bars to help them do another lap of another gallery,” he told MAP Magazine.
Alastair Mackinven was born in 1971 in Clatteridge, England. He attended the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Canada, as an undergraduate during the early ’90s. Then, in 1996, he received an MFA from Goldsmiths College, the London art school that was at the time known for training outré conceptual artists, with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and others of the Young British Artists generation among its alumni.
During the ’90s, Mackinven performed as a guitarist with the Scottish punk band Country Teasers, which gained a cult following in the art world. The band has put out a range of albums, the most recent of which was released in 2008.
The punkish attitude of those albums sometimes carried over into Mackinven’s art. For one series, Mackinven painted pieces that were accompanied by stars in various amounts, similar to the ones awarded by critics to denote a work’s quality. When these works were put up for sale at Art Basel in 2007, Mackinven told his dealer to price each painting according to the amount of stars pictured.
He followed that series with another grouping of abstractions that he termed “Abstract Capitalist Realism.” These paintings, he said, inhabited the realm of “the un-reanimated painting, painting which has no life yet is not dead.”
Toward the end of his career, Mackinven’s paintings turned lush and dreamy. He obtained their warm colors by utilizing iron powder, which he then oxidized by spraying them with vinegar. “It enables me to put colour on top of colour,” he said in his Frontrunner interview.
At the same time, Mackinven also taught for years at London’s vaunted Slade School of Fine Art. He also regularly visited classes taught by painter Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
In 2017, not long before his first solo show in New York, at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Mackinven was diagnosed with cancer. After the opening, he received surgery, then spent the three-month recovery period playing scales on his guitar.
“Since then, it has opened up a door, a fascination with music theory, even though I’m slowly going through it on my own and I’m probably misunderstanding it,” he told Frontrunner. “But it’s a problem, an abstraction like mathematics or art, it occupies my mind.”