Tennants are delighted to welcome back Martin Kinnear for his new solo exhibition Elegy for The Dales.
The exhibition will explore powerful themes of memory, time and place, and has developed out of his seminal picture ‘Lethe’, which was the centrepiece of Regeneration, his major exhibition at The Bowes Museum in Spring 2022. Now shortlisted for the prestigious 2023 Chaiya Art Awards, ‘Lethe’ is a painting about how places can define both our past and future and leave an inexorable imprint on our lives.
For his new exhibition, Kinnear will reflect on the transformative effect The Dales has on both those who live here and on the thousands of people who visit each year. Taking the idea of the Yorkshire Dales as a kind of natural cathedral imbued with an innate spirituality, Kinnear will explore how the Dales landscape transforms lives through its beauty, its majesty and its wildness.
Kinnear says: “My ambition in Elegy for The Dales is to create a requiem for all the lives that have been lived here and that have been marked by its landscape. A distillation in paint of time and place where our past can be reconciled to a new future.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Martin Kinnear (b. 1969), is a self taught oil painter from the council estates of Northern England with awards from the Paris Salon and collectors at the highest level of UK society.
His work spans many subjects but is rooted in just one, an autobiographical view of the world as he sees it.
In 2004 Martin suffered a catastrophic brain injury which left him disabled and changed the nature of his work and his thinking; emphasising the experiential and possible over superficial observational painting.
To see more of his work, you can follow him on Instagram @kinnearmartin
FREE EXHIBITION
