John Keane : Twelve Selves

22 Feb-7 Apr 2018

Overview

A new exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, will focus on Keane’s most recent series of paintings, which centre on a single self-portrait image. The exhibition of paintings, many obscured and transformed with reactive metallic paints, examines the nature of self reflection, and how experience can inform our understanding of self. The series Twelve Selves started with the image used for the self portrait Fear No.1, produced in 2013, in which Keane placed himself in the role of a victim of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, alongside a series of sourced imagery surrounding the Moscow show trials that took place during the 1930s. Keane has described the series as attempting to “tease out the essence of the most fundamental driver of human reaction, usually found at the root of all violence - fear.”