MICHAEL KIDNER FROM ROTHKO TO RILEY
30th April, 2025 – 31st May, 2025
Flowers Gallery
21 CORK STREET
LONDON
W1S 3LZ
From Rothko to Riley: A Retrospective of Early Works by Michael Kidner, Pioneer of Optical Art and British Abstraction
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present from Rothko to Riley — a retrospective exhibition of early works by the late British artist Michael Kidner, opening on 30 April and on view until 31 May 2025.
A pioneer of Optical Art, Michael Kidner is recognised as a foundational figure in British abstraction, devoting much of his career to developing work of a constructive nature. Both rational and playful, he combined visual responses to the principles of mathematics, science, and chaos theories with an abiding interest in the irrational and unpredictable nature of the human condition.
Bringing together works from 1956 to 1970, the exhibition traces Kidner’s evolution from his early After Image series— influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Mark Rothko’s colour fields— to his later explorations of wave patterns and optical effects, rooted in chaos theory and mathematical principles.
from Rothko to Riley situates Kidner’s art in dialogue with two significant artists of postwar abstraction: Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley. These two names bookend Kidner’s formal progression, from his early immersion in the emotive language of colour field painting to his later embrace of perceptual systems and optical phenomena. The exhibition title underscores both the continuity and radical transformation in his approach to painting over five decades.
The exhibition opens with a series of early paintings from the mid-1950s, in which Kidner explored luminous planes of colour evocative of Rothko’s spiritual abstractions. These works capture Kidner’s attunement to the psychological effects of colour, atmosphere, and spatial ambiguity.
Oil on canvas, 168 x 183 cm
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
By the early 1960s, he began to explore the newly emerging language of Op Art. Engaging with theories of perception, wave mechanics, and pattern disruption, he developed a unique visual vocabulary characterised by vibrating lines, moiré effects, and pulsating grids. Works from this period demonstrate his interest in visual instability and rhythmic structures, producing images that appear to shimmer or shift in the viewer’s gaze.
from Rothko to Riley also foregrounds the physical and optical experience of looking, something Kidner believed to be fundamental to painting. For him, art was not a vehicle for fixed meaning but a zone of enquiry—one that could reconcile the cerebral and the sensory.
The exhibition offers a lens through which to reconsider the broader trajectory of abstraction and the enduring vitality of visual experimentation.
MICHAEL KIDNER FROM ROTHKO TO RILEY opens on the 30th of April, 2025 until the 31st of May, 2025 at Flowers Gallery
©2025 Flowers Gallery
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