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Visual Anarchy

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The artist Michael Kidner died in 2009. In New York, a new exhibition at Flowers Gallery celebrates his works on paper from the 1960s and 2000s, which found him experimenting with moire patterns, pentagons based on Penrose tiling, and the geometrical effects of light. “I was curious about how the brain interpreted objects,” he said in 1996. “It’s a black box and yet we seem to see colors and shapes, and it’s all coming in little chemico-electrical signals along nerves. So, whatever’s happening in there is incredibly abstract, and at one point I was thinking of these patterns more as maybe something that goes on inside the black box.” Stephen Bann described Kidner’s patterns as “constitutionally unstable and liable to take you to the brink of visual anarchy.’’

Michael Kidner, Particle Evolution: The End of the Tunnel at Cern. Stage 1, 2008, colored pencil on paper, 44 ½” x 67 ¾”.

 

Untitled, 2009, colored pencil on paper, 23 ¼” x 33 ¾”.

Rotation. Pale Blue, Red & Orange, 1964, oil pastel on paper, 13″ x 15″.

Untitled, 1963, oil pastel on paper, 7 ½” x 11 ¼”.

Untitled, 2006, colored pencil on paper, 35 ½” x 53 ¼”.

Untitled, 1966, oil pastel on paper, 35 ½” x 53 ¼”.