HackelBury Presents Ian McKeever’s Seven Stones Exhibition in London

HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.

Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.

Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.

“It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me”. IM

Rather than depicting the Avebury stone circle as landscape or monument, McKeever focuses on the presence of the stones: their physical mass, indomitable endurance, and radically non-human sense of time. The photographs do not attempt to encompass the site as a whole. Instead, McKeever moves close to the stones, cropping tightly, circling them and allowing their weight and density to assert themselves within the frame.

The photographs Seven Stones emerge directly from McKeever’s painting practice. Known primarily for his abstract paintings, McKeever frequently turns to photography not as a preparatory tool, but as a “reality check”: a way of affirming the world of sensation that his paintings pursue in more elusive, amorphous forms. While his paintings allow presence to remain latent and indeterminate, photography pins it down to a recognisable object. However, also recognising that a photograph as such is itself an abstraction, as is the painting. This gap between an object and an implied presence McKeever explored in his monumental painting series Henge Paintings 2017 – 2022.

“It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself”. IM

The tension between the fixity and certainty of the photographic image and the open-ended temporality of painting is central to McKeever’s work. A photograph holds a single, emphatically fixed moment in time, while a painting evolves across months or years, resisting completion and refusing to belong to either a single point in time or a single viewpoint.

Ian McKeever: Seven Stones invites viewers into a quiet but profound encounter with the stones as presences rather than images, asking how we register the world physically and sensorially and how art mediates between what is seen, what is felt, and what endures across time.

About Ian McKeever

Ian McKeever (British, b. 1946) emerged as an artist in the early 1970’s out of an interest in both conceptualism and abstract painting, the prevalent trends at the time. Although seeing himself primarily as a painter, this is informed by his ongoing engagement with photography. Not in the blurring of the boundary between the two disciplines, rather in seeing and understanding them as distinct visual languages.

McKeever received the DAAD scholarship in 1989 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1990. He has exhibited internationally and has taught extensively in the UK, Germany, and the USA including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Ian McKeever was elected a Royal Academician in 2003 and his work is represented in leading international public Collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Fine Art, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-seven years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

NOTES TO EDITORS

In May this year the Royal Academy will publish a book of the selected writings on art by Ian McKeever covering the period 1978 – 2025. The publication will have entries ranging from his travel journals to such places as Papua New Guinea and Greenland alongside essays on such artists as Piero della Francesca, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell. This will be illustrated with a selection of sketchbook pages and photographs drawn from the artist’s travels and studio.