Ian Kiaer
Endnote, oblique, 2022
(…) This interest in return, reinterpretation and the incompleteness of influence accounts for Kiaer’s frequent employment of cardboard maquettes. For Kiaer, the architectural model can exist in three different states (representational, experimental, propositional) and, as such, can occupy three different tenses at once (past, present, future). In this way, it stands as an inherently in-between object: a means of ‘revisiting and rethinking and experimenting and then presenting, again, for the future’, the artist notes. Kiaer’s faith in the conceptual potential of the model has led him to reference and respond to such architectural luminaries as Peter de Bretteville, Aldo Rossi and, most notably, Frederick Kiesler. In revisiting and reappraising the provisional designs of these architects via his own maquettes, Kiaer encourages a broader reconsideration of the propositional potential of the art object itself, while also alluding to the manner in which all creative gestures are inseparable from one another.
Excerpt from the introduction text to Ian Kier’s exhibition “Endnote, oblique”, Alison Jacques, London, 23 March – 29 April 2023.