Title: Leo Kenney, a retrospective
Description: In the mid-1970s Leo Kenney was at the height of his celebrity. Influenced by Surrealism as well as by Northwest painters Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, Kenney captivated audiences with his meticulous gouache technique, luminous colour, and imagery that uniquely reflected the times. Kenney quit high school in 1943, on his 18th birthday, to devote himself to painting. Just two years later, the Seattle Art Museum bought its first painting by Kenney for the permanent collection. The gifted young painter rapidly developed into one of the Northwest's premiere artists. However, constrained by ill health and snail-like work pace, Kenney was unable to meet the demands of his growing fame. After his Seattle Art Museum retrospective in 1973, his output dwindled. After the 1970s Kenney had no gallery exhibitions. Now for the first time, the full range of Kenney's extraordinary oeuvre is revealed. Spanning nearly 50 yeas, the paintings illustrated show the systematic, disciplined progression of an artist whose work developed in synchronicity with the spirit of the times and, in the end, transcended it. From his dark early paintings executed under the sway of Andre Breton's theory of "psychic automatism" to the radiant mandala paintings of the 1960s to the final series of shimmering "geometrics", the works strike variations on a theme. Kenney paints the dualities of human nature, the vastness of the universe, and the microcosm of life on earth--in a spectrum of dazzling colour. Leo Kenney, a retrospective contains a foreword by Museum of Northwest Art curator Barbara Straker James and a comprehensive essay by poet and art critic Sheila Farr.
Subjects: Exhibitions, Painting, exhibitions
People: Leo Kenney (1925-)