The British artist, painter, musician, writer and teacher Alastair MacKinven has died at the age of fifty-three following a long illness. MacKinven was represented by Maureen Paley, who confirmed his death in a statement describing him as ‘a wonderful person who will be greatly missed by all who knew and appreciated him and his work’.
Born in Clatterbridge in 1971, he received his BFA from the Alberta College of Art, Calgary in 1994 and his MFA from Goldsmiths in 1996. His crossdisciplinary work, which spanned figurative painting, film sculpture and performance, often brought a playful, critical perspective to the act of artmaking itself, while drawing into question the institutional framework of the gallery. In one performance at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2008, he deliberately glued his hand to the floor of the gallery and waited to see how long it would take for gallery staff to offer him help.
In recent years he focused primarily on painting, conjuring a haunted, dreamlike atmosphere in figurative works that ‘hearken back to the late nineteenth century – to the era of symbolism, aestheticism, and decadence’, as Barry Schwabsky wrote in Artforum 2021, when reviewing MacKinven’s solo exhibition Dlnrg [oeeey] at Reena Spaulings Fine Art (who also represented the artist). For these works, MacKinven prepared his canvases with oxidised iron powder, creating a sense that their almost-luminescent surface was gradually rusting and degrading, and lending them a porous quality akin to the dry-powder pigment used in frescoes.
As a musician, MacKinven was a longtime guitarist for Scottish art-punk band Country Teasers, formed in Edinburgh in the mid-nineties. He was also a part-time lecturer in painting at Slade School of Fine Art in London and a visiting lecturer at the Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf.
Describing his own ‘metamorphosis from an artist who would use paint to a painter with a capital P’, MacKinven stated in 2022: ‘Painting is not a solid membrane covering a frame. It is an endless deep space’.
