MARTIN KINNEAR: Elegy for The Dales
The Garden Rooms at Tennants are delighted to present a new solo exhibition by the much-loved artist Martin Kinnear - Elegy for The Dales. 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. The exhibition is free to enter, and all the paintings will be for sale.
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.
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.”
Harriet Hunter Smart, Curator at Tennant expands: “Martin’s evocative landscapes with semi-abstracted figures allow the viewer to put themselves in the painting. They are a reflection of what each of us who are lucky enough to live, work or spend time in the Dales feels when amongst the hills and valleys; inspiring rugged beauty, the gentle comfort of nature, space to breathe”.
Martin will also be giving an Artist’s Talk as part of the exhibition on 19th April at 2pm, tickets are available from The Garden Rooms at Tennants (£12 per person).
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.
The exhibition will be free to enter and will be open daily. For further details please visit www.tennantsgardenrooms.com.
