This simple but powerful picture stands at the interface between Kinley’ s early and later work. Its large-scale format in fact anticipates the extended emptiness of his later colour ‘ field’ compositions where this individual artist positioned simple graphic features, usually figure or animal forms. On this larger scale, the palette-knifed impasto of his 1950s works is replaced, almost as a result of technical necessity, by thinner paint surfaces. The single figure appears iconic and sculptural.

The later perceptual sculpture of Giacometti is suggested here as are the ethnic and primitive figure artefacts that inspired the great Swiss-born Parisian sculptor. In his Kinley monograph, the critic Marco Livingstone speaks of, « a tacit acknowledgement of the history of the human form in ancient art» and of the artist’ s habit of, « conflating landscape with the female body» . By relinquishing the reclining poses of the late 1950s and replacing them with vertical ones as here, Kinley reduces this metamorphic conflation while achieving what Livingstone calls an, “austere grandeur” .

Given these considerations, it comes as no surprise that Walking Figure was produced at a time of change in Kinley’ s life. The last of four solo shows with Gimpel came in 1963 to be followed by shows with Arthur Tooth during the 1970s. Also, he had recently visited the United States for the first time where he had a 1961 exhibition at Paul Rosenberg and Co. The ambitious scale and iconic reduction of much contemporary American art no doubt influenced Kinley at this time as indeed did the late cut-outs of Matisse and the simplified motifs of the Matisse-inspired American Richard Diebenkorn.

1. Marco Livingstone ‘ Peter Kinley’ p.18 Lund Humphries 2010

The artist
Gimpel Fils, London
Offer Waterman, London
Private Collection

Catherine Kinley & Marco Livingstone ‘Peter Kinley’, 2010, illustrated page 28, no.25

Bodilly Gallery, Cambridge , 1994