JOHN KIKI
FIFTY YEARS IN THE
FIGURATIVE FOLD
Author: Keith Roberts
Publication date: April 2018
Format: Paperback
Size: 260 x 215 cm
Pages: 196 pp
Illustrations: 249
ISBN: 978-1-5272-1986-1
John Kiki is an English figurative painter with deep roots in the Greek Cypriot community. He trained in the sixties at Camberwell Art School and at the Royal Academy Schools where Frank Auerbach mentored him. He relocated to the East Anglian coast where he continues to make his instantly recognisable, large, figurative paintings. Over the last fifty years his paintings have presented us with a joyous and life-affirming cast of colourful characters engaged in an endless human drama that stretches back to ancient Greece. On the one hand they show ordinary people doing ordinary things, dancing, courting, running, posing, chatting, riding, walking the dog, while on the other they show themes that we would in Renaissance times have called ‘history paintings’, with motifs taken from the ancient myths, legends and the Bible.