John Kindness

John Kindness is one of Northern Ireland’s best known artists. Typical of Kindness's work is Treasures of New York, a series he produced when he spent time in New York in the early 1990s, consisting of frescoes, mosaics, assemblages, and a site-specific installation. The works incorporate urban objects such as concrete slabs, taxi cab fragments, and garbage cans and are created using Greco-Roman techniques; this juxtaposition suggests parallels between the steady decay of contemporary cultural capitals like New York, with those now extinct, such as Rome. Incisive, humorous and bitterly ironic, the works depict images of homelessness, drug abuse, and other detriments of contemporary society.

He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Ulster Museum in Belfast, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Art in General in New York, and Third Eye Centre in Glasgow. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Imperial War Museum in London, Tucson Museum of Art, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, and Shanghai Art Museum, among others.

Courtesy of Art in General