Michael Kane – Life Story

MICHAEL KANE is a painter, and, like many painters present and past, he is also a writer. He has published three modest books of verse and numerous prose pieces, usually dealing with matters of art and literature. Of a generation which has lived during the high point of the flowering of 20th-century modernism, the great practitioners of this movement, as well as the masters of the past, are his exemplars. He has remarked to the effect that “the whole history of art” must somehow be present in even the most contemporary of works. 

Life Story is a animated and visually provocative installation of one hundred paintings by Michael Kane. Embarking on this new body of work (for EV+A 2010) prompted Kane to take a fresh slant on the recurrent themes of his work over the years. The paintings are rendered in ink, acrylic and collage on newsprint magazine pages, and often incorporate elements of the underlying story. 

The ephemera that catch the artist's attention in Life Story are often humorous, melancholy, trivial, satirical or absurd - from the minutiae of an ordinary life to the portrait of a goat that grazed near the artist's Dublin home. In all the imagery, Kane's existential message is implicit.