Walking Figure, 1962
Oil on Canvas
Signed lower right
182.8 x 137.0 cm (72 x 54 inches)

Provenance:
The artist
Gimpel Fils, London
Offer Waterman, London
Private Collector

Exhibition History:
Bodilly Gallery, Cambridge, 1994

Notes:
Peter Kinley was born in Vienna in 1926 and came to Britain as a refugee in 1938. He served in the British Army, 1944-48, and afterwards studied at the Dusseldorf Academy before returning to London’s St Martin’s School of Art. He subsequently taught at St Martin’s and Wimbledon Schools of Art and, from 1971 to 1988, at Bath Academy.

Kinley’s first one-man exhibition was at Gimpel Fils in 1954. His first solo exhibition abroad was at Paul Rosenberg in New York in 1961. He continued to show regularly in Britain and internationally until his death in 1988. A retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1982 and a memorial exhibition at the Anne Berthoud Gallery in 1989.

Like many young European artists of his generation Kinley initially looked to France for inspiration. Despite the importance of Picasso in the immediate post-war period , he was initially more drawn to the work of Nicolas de Stael, then later Matisse, Gauguin and increasingly the images and pictorial conventions of non-western art, particularly classical Indian sculpture and miniature painting.

In Kinley’s increasingly simplified paintings, space, movement and weight are suggested by the subtle articulation of colour, scale and rhythm, establishing precise relationships between clearly defined and often flattened shapes. In this work ‘Walking Figure’ we see the way Kinley has distilled the motion of the figure into strong and defined blocks of colour. The grey and black of the interior wall space framing the flesh of the figure as she moves across the space. There are still elements of the earlier De Stael influence with the texture of the paint still tangible. Standing Figures and Walking Figures are very indicative of Kinley’s style during this period. Almost always painted in an interior space, with an easel or mirror or table, the figure stands, abstracted, framed by the sweep of interior space, the pink of the figure strongly set against a palette of bold red, or black or in this case grey. In his later work, in the last decade of his life, Kinley’s simplification of form became even greater with the use of paint becoming smooth and sweeping, with any hint of impasto lost.

All Kinley’s works are autobiographical. They are distilled records of places where he lived, people he knew, objects and paintings he admired and moods he experienced. They transform the transient, visible public world and the artist’s feelings and memories into emblematic images. They are also about reconciliation, the fusion of method and image. ’I try to make paintings that are strong enough to remain in the memory even after a brief encounter. My paintings are formal reconstructions of experience and could be seen as equivalents for the circumstances which were their original motivation. ’ (Peter Kinley)

Copyright Osborne Samuel Ltd, London
POA