Ian McKeever: ‘Weight and Measure’ at Young Gallery, Salisbury

Installation view of ‘Ian McKeever: Weight and Measure’ at Young Gallery, Salisbury, 2018

It feels as if Salisbury has been in the news an awful lot lately, for all the wrong reasons; so Instantloveland is happy to do its bit to redress that imbalance, by drawing your attention to Ian McKeever: Weight and Measure in the city’s Young Gallery.

Few painters working now have embraced printmaking as wholeheartedly as McKeever. He’s made etchings, lithographs, and woodcut monoprints, and plenty of them, working in series over three decades to translate the dark, looming presences and ghostly grid forms of his paintings into stark examples of graphic art.

There’s a lot here to enjoy: but if Instantloveland had to pick a favourite, it would be the folio sheets from McKeever’s 1993 collaboration with poet Thomas A. Clark, ‘that which appears’. Hard-edged, granular forms, some geometric, some biomorphic, some both (all derived from sheets of plywood cut to shape with a jigsaw, inked in black and printed) share the paper with the short lines of Clark’s verse: equal parts conversation and confrontation.

Installation view of ‘Ian McKeever: Weight and Measure’ at Young Gallery, Salisbury, 2018