Michael Kirkham
Many curators say art should contain a statement about the world, or how it should be. A better world . . . While I paint the world we’d rather not see; the world as it shouldn’t be.
Michael Kirkham via Het Parool, 2018
It is in Michael Kirkham’s (1971, United Kingdom) commentary on the contemporary that any sense of melancholy, irony, or even voyeurism so often related to the Kirkham’s paintings disappears. The power and beauty of his work are inseparable from the discomfort it brings about when it confronts the viewer with the bleakness of humanity. Therefore, any form of sadness, irony, voyeurism, or discomfort felt in Kirkham’s paintings can only be a sign of confrontation, recognition or even emotion of the spectator, pointing out to us what essentially makes us human throughout the complexities of today.
