KIM KEEVER American b. 1955
Kim Keever studied Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA and was briefly a thermal engineer working primarily on NASA projects. Keever changed career in the late 1970s to become a full time artist. Yet he has always drawn on his original vocation by retaining a scientific and investigative process in his work, while at the same time displaying an astute awareness of historical landscape art.
Keever’s landscapes, that are at first glance redolent of the Hudson River School and the German Romantic painters, are actually detailed miniature scenes that he builds himself, places in a 200-gallon tank, submerges in water, and then photographs (as shown right). The landscape and the abstract images all have paint dispersing through the water adding a certain character to the constructed landscape in the tank and a high degree of randomness to the abstract images. More recently, Keever has been incorporating balloons to his strictly abstract photographs.
Kim Keever lives and works in New York City and his work is in numerous collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virgina; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York; Patterson Museum, Patterson, New Jersey; George Washington University Gallery, Washington DC; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Elgin Community College, Elgin, Illinois.
Upcoming exhibitions of Kim Keever’s work in the US include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, 2018, and Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa. 2019. Keever’s work will be shown internationally at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, Berlin, 2018; Kallmann-Museum Ismaning, Museum Haus Ludwig Saarlouis, Stadtgalerie Kiel, 2019; and Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung in Berlin, 2020.
