Peter Kinley 1926-1988
Studio Interior 115, 1959
oil on canvas
49 x 33 ins
signed and dated lower left 'Kinley '59'dated and inscribed on the canvas overlap 'No.115 Studio Interior 1959'

Provenance
Gimpel Fils, London
F S Kissner

Exhibited
Gimpel Fils, London



Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage, Kinley was sent to England on his own as a child in 1939, and was fostered by a Roman Catholic family in Lytham St. Anne’s. After serving in the army of occupation in Germany just after the war, he first took up his artistic studies at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1948, before moving back to London to St.Martin’s School of Art. It was a cosmopolitan upbringing which is clearly reflected in the strongly European flavour of his early work where Matisse, Gauguin and, particularly evident in Studio Interior No. 115, De Stael were the most significant influences. Despite regular shows in the 1950s at the prestigious Gimpel Fils Gallery, Kinley never quite gained the wider reputation his consistently thoughtful and sophisticated work deserved - pressures of full time teaching and a somewhat unagressive temperament may have had something to do with this. As a consequence Kinley has always remained something of an artist’s artist. Yet, looking at the toughness and effortless simplicity of a work like this, with its intensity of colour and monumental structure, it quickly becomes clear that here is a painter very much to be regarded alongside his peers in British abstract art of the 50s and 60s - Hilton, Heath, Scott and Frost among them.