Chaotic, dark and disturbing, brash, colourful, simplistic – throw a handful of adjectives at the work of Jeff Keen and probability dictates you’ll hit the right work with the right word sooner rather than later. Which isn’t to say the artist-filmmaker was in any way slapdash or lacking focus – rather that in an extraordinary career spanning multiple decades and mediums, he explored so many dimensions of life as seen through his particularly skewed life-lens.
The experiences of life in the Second World War intelligence corps weaponry division was to provide Keen with the compelling catalyst that drove his early work in paint, drawings and collage. Indeed throughout his artistic life, which continued until his death in 2012, when Keen stared into the abyss he saw not the abyss staring back, but powerful explosions of emotion which he was to capture on paper, further explore in pop-art film and performance, and latterly draw on in video and computer technology work. The Kate MacGarry gallery on Old Nichol Street, London, is currently showing a retrospective of Keen’s work, which will remain on display until 20th April.
