R.B. Kitaj | London to Los Angeles | Exhibition Film

In London, the Piano Nobile Gallery presents the exhibition -  R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles. This short film features interviews with Marco Livingstone, a leading specialist on Kitaj’s work; Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery; and the artist’s daughter Dominie Kitaj.

R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in a decade. It provides a chronological overview of Kitaj's career, exploring the relationship between his art and the places he lived. 

The Piano Nobile Gallery explains that "Although he travelled widely, spending seasons and sometimes whole years in California, Catalonia, Paris and New York, Kitaj made London his home from 1959 – the year he entered the Royal College of Art – until 1997. For the last decade of his life, from 1997 to 2007, he lived in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes little-known early work of the fifties, the groundbreaking ‘collagist’ work of the sixties that established his reputation, and the life drawings and glowing paintings of the seventies, continuing through to Kitaj's rediscovery of painting in the eighties and his final period in Los Angeles. An accompanying publication includes original essays by Andrew Dempsey, Marco Livingstone and Colin Wiggins, in addition to extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, now held by the Tate Archive and published here for the first time."

Much more on Kitaj at: https://greggchadwick.blogspot.com/2007/10/rb-kitaj-exits.html

Gregg Chadwick
The Diasporist (Portrait of R.B. Kitaj)
30”x22” monotype on paper 2011