Kenneth Webb: Kaleidoscope
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Übersicht
At ninety-eight years old, Kenneth Webb presents not only a vibrant selection of recent paintings but also a curated group of masterpieces from a long and luminous career.
This exhibition, Kenneth Webb: Kaleidoscope, marks a significant moment in the career of one of the most distinctive voices in modern Irish and British painting. At ninety-eight years of age, Kenneth Webb presents a vibrant selection of recent works alongside a carefully chosen group of paintings drawn from across a long and distinguished career. Seen together, they offer a compelling view of an artist who, over nearly eight decades, has continually reinterpreted the landscapes, memories and visual impressions that have shaped his practice.
Kenneth Webb’s association with Gladwell & Patterson spans several decades. Since his early exhibitions with the gallery in the 1980s, his work has attracted a wide audience of collectors and admirers, developing in character while retaining its unmistakable visual identity. The relationship between artist and gallery has been sustained through a shared commitment to presenting his work with care and continuity.
Across these paintings, recurring motifs emerge: the dark silhouettes of blackthorn trees, fields punctuated by poppies, and expansive interpretations of bogland, sky and shifting light. These works extend beyond topographical description, presenting landscapes shaped by recollection and observation. Kaleidoscope brings together these strands in a final exhibition that reflects the breadth and longevity of Webb’s artistic life.
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For many years Kenneth Webb has drawn inspiration from fragments of ancient 'bog oak'-semi-fossilised branches preserved for centuries within the peatlands of western Ireland. Formed in low-oxygen, acidic conditions, these remnants of oak emerge from the bog darkened by time, their surfaces shaped by pressure, mineral deposits and the slow processes of burial. The peatlands surrounding Webb's studio in Connemara have provided a direct and enduring encounter with these remarkable forms.
Their presence has informed a recurring strand within his practice. Weathered, twisted and sculptural, the branches possess a striking physical character that Webb has returned to repeatedly throughout his career in what has become known as the Bog Oak series. Rather than approaching them as archaeological relics, he interprets their structure, weight and movement through paint, translating their contorted silhouettes into expressive forms that suggest vitality and motion.
Within these works, the ancient timber becomes a point of departure for broader themes of landscape, memory and geological time. The forms retain an association with the peatlands from which they emerged, yet they are reimagined through colour and gesture, reflecting Webb's continuing engagement with the materials, histories and natural forces embedded within the Irish landscape.
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During the 1960s Kenneth Webb travelled to Lanzarote, where the sight of poppies scattered across the island's dark volcanic terrain left a lasting impression. The intensity of their colour against the stark landscape prompted an enduring interest in the expressive possibilities of red within his painting. From this point onward, the presence of poppies - and the vivid chromatic range they introduce - became a recurring feature in Webb's work.
Soon after returning to Ballywalter, Webb encountered similar displays of poppies growing across the sand dunes near his home. Their appearance within the coastal landscape led to a sustained series of paintings in which fields of red blossoms were integrated into broader interpretations of land and sky. By the early 1970s these forms had become a recognisable element within the expansive landscapes that Webb developed during this period.
The changing character of the poppy itself, its shifting tones, from deep crimson to orange or violet, and the way light passes through the thin petals, provided Webb with a continual source of visual variation. Whether dispersed across a landscape or gathered in dense clusters, the flowers offered both a structural motif and a means of exploring colour within the wider rhythms of the natural world.
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