Michael Kidner

Michael Kidner was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, in 1917. He read history and anthropology at Cambridge University (1936-39) and landscape architecture at Ohio State University, USA (1940-41). In 1953, after serving for five years in the Canadian army, he took up painting full-time, living in Paris until 1955.

As an artist, Kidner is self-taught. His first solo exhibition was at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1959. Other significant one-man shows were held at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1984 (a selection from which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lodz and other centres in Poland in 1985) and recently in galleries in Austria, Germany and Britain. He also works to commission. His sculptures can be seen at the Museo Internazionale di Scultura all'aperto Citta' di Portofino, Italy (1988); Vlissingen, Holland (1989); and the Alderman Smith Library, Nuneaton (1996). In 1995 he made a net construction for each of the five windows of the new Dresdener Bank at Merzeburg, Germany. His art is represented in some of the best public collections in Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and the United States.

Michael Kidner is a painter, sculptor and printmaker, one of Britain's leading Systems artists. (The Systems artist sets certain conditions for a piece that limit intervention - the ultimate form being determined by recurring themes). However, the use of colour and line in his paintings frequently creates visual tension or perspectives that operate independently on the eye. Computer-derived imaging has in recent years complemented his early works in oil and gouache and silk-screen printing. Kidner says: 'By integrating a colour-coded pattern into an existing pattern I aim to collapse our familiar sense of order.' His success within his declared aim is evident in both his two-dimensional and three-dimensional art.