Artist of the day

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Artist of the Day, July 9, 2026 : Michael Kidner, a British artist /op art. (#2574)

Michael James Kidner RA (1917 – 2009) was a British op artist. Active from mid-1960s, Kidner was an early exponent of the genre. Through his interest in mathematics, he was part of the Constructivism movement and chaos and wave theories influence his work.

Kidner was born in Kettering, the son of an industrialist and was one of six children. He was educated at Bedales School, and from 1939 read History and Anthropology at Cambridge before studying Landscape Architecture at Ohio State University. He was staying with his older sister and her American husband in the US when war broke out in Europe. Unable to return home, he joined the Canadian army for five years. He was subsequently posted to England and after D-Day saw active service in France in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals.

After demobilisation in 1946, he enrolled at Goldsmiths University to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design but withdrew after three months. From 1947–50, Kidner taught at Pitlochry Prep School in Perthshire and it was here that he started to paint as a hobby. In 1949 he met and married his wife Marion Frederick, an American actress. From 1951 to 1952 he worked as a theatre designer in Bromley and Barnstaple whilst continuing to paint.

During a painting holiday in the south of France, Kidner met André Lhote who introduced him to Cubism and encouraged him to move to Paris and become a full-time painter. He travelled to Paris in 1953 where he sporadically attended Lhote's atelier. After two years he returned to North Devon where his brother was working as a GP. He moved to St Ives for several months where he became acquainted with Trevor Bell, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, and Peter Lanyon.

On moving to London in 1957, Kidner was introduced to the New American Painting exhibition at the Tate Gallery where he saw the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Kidner later became influenced by Mark Rothko's color field paintings. These inspired his After Image paintings, sculptures and reliefs, executed between 1957 and 1962.

Kidner's first solo exhibition was held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1959 where he showed his After Image paintings. In 1965 his work was featured in the op art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with that of Bridget Riley.

In 1969, Kidner co–founded the Systems Group with Jeffrey Steele and others. Around this time, the notion of color as form urged Kidner on to do a columnar sculpture of a wave. At this stage he became interested in number theory as the key to "the nature of order" and "the structure of reality",

In his last decade, Kidner's work became more colorful and free. Titles such as Entangled Hyacinth Bulbs, Invasion of Iraq: Surprise Resistance, and Particle Evolution: The End of the Tunnel at CERN.

© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Michael James Kidner or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Michael Kidner

Homage to Rothko, 1956

Untitled (Red, Orange, Purple), 1957

Raindrops, 1959

Untitled Nº. 33, 1959

Circle after Image, 1959-60

Black, White & Orange Split Circle, 1960

Orange and White, 1960

Red, 1961

Brown, Blue and Violet Nº. 2, 1964

Orange, Blue and Green, 1964

Orange, Pink and Violet, 1964

Untitled (Abstract), 1964

Axion Study, 1965

Mauve, Brown, Green and Ochre, 1965

Red and Olive Wave, 1965

Butterfly Wings, 1966

Column study, 1970

Blue Grey Brown Wave, 1971

Color Column (Nº. 3), 1971

Columns, 1971

3D Wave Lattice, 1973

Dodecahedron Relief within a Circle, 1975

Icosahedron, 1975

Polyhedron Column, 1975

Tetrahedron, 1975

Relay, 1978

The Elastic Membrane, 1979

Penrose Tiling/Pentagon Construction Series, 1999

Love is a Virus from Outer Space, 2001

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Artist of the Day, July 8, 2026 : Patricia Piccinini, an Australian sculptor (#2573)

Patricia Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone and lives in Australia. Her work encompasses sculpture, photography, video and drawing and her practice examines the increasingly nebulous boundary between the artificial and the natural as it appears in contemporary culture and ideas. Her surreal drawings, hybrid animals and vehicular creatures question the way that contemporary technology and culture changes our understanding of what it means to be human and wonders at our relationships with – and responsibilities towards – that which we create. While ethics are central, her approach is ambiguous and questioning rather than moralistic and didactic.

“My practice is focused on bodies and relationships; the relationships between people and other creatures, between people and our bodies, between creatures and the environment, between the artificial and the natural. I am particularly interested in the way that the everyday realities of the world around us change these relations. Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology. My work aims to shift the way that people look at the world around them and question their assumptions about the relationships they have with the world.” — Patricia Piccinini

In 2003 her exhibition We Are Family represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale before touring to the Hara Museum, Tokyo (JPN) and the Bendigo Art Gallery, (AUS). Her solo museum survey exhibitions ComCiência at CCBB toured to São Paulo, Brasília, Rio De Janeiro and Belo Horizonte in Brazil and was named the most popular contemporary art exhibition in 2016 by The Art Newspaper.

Patricia Piccinini received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1991. In 1994 she initiated The Basement Project Gallery in Melbourne, which she coordinated until 1996. In 2014 she was awarded the Melbourne Art Foundation Visual Arts Award. In 2016 she was awarded a Doctor of Visual and Performing Arts (Honora Causa) from the Victorian College of the Arts and was an Enterprise Professor at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne from 2017-2023. She is currently a Professor of Practice at RMIT University since 2025. Her studio and home are on Melbourne, Australia.

© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Patricia Piccinini or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only