Hartgrove Painting No. 2 1992 - 1993

Editor: Ian McKeever’s “Hartgrove Painting No. 2” is a large, mostly white canvas with these blurry dark shapes underneath a kind of grid. It feels very obscured. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see a commentary on the act of viewing itself. Consider the period in which McKeever was working; abstraction was heavily questioned. Is he obscuring something, or revealing the constructed nature of how we see art and landscape through memory? Editor: So, the painting is less about a specific landscape and more about how we remember or misremember places? Curator: Precisely. Think about how museums frame our understanding, often presenting a sanitized, incomplete picture. The "Hartgrove" series, I think, hints at this manipulation. Editor: That's a perspective I hadn't considered. It makes the painting much more engaging, knowing it questions its own presentation. Curator: Indeed, it prompts us to be more critical viewers, both of art and the institutions that present it.