British painter and performance artist Alastair Mackinven has died at 53, eight years after he was diagnosed with cancer. His London-based gallery, Maureen Paley, confirmed the artist’s death on Wednesday via Instagram. Throughout his career, Mackinven was known for his continuously evolving practice, which embraced a range of techniques and media, from provocative performances to dreamlike paintings.
Born in Clatterbridge, England in 1971, Mackinven received his BFA from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Canada in 1994 and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 1996. During the ’90s, he performed as a guitarist with the Scottish punk band Country Teasers.
Mackinven first gained a following in England with his provocative performances and films in the late ’90s and throughout the aughts. He created his first film work, All The Things You Could Be By Now If Robert Smithson’s Wife Was Your Mother, in 2007. It involved Mackinven amassing 30,000 pounds of dirt and navigating through a large pipe naked, a performance of rebirth that played off a work by land artist Nancy Holt, who was married to Smithson.
In his later years, Mackinven shifted his focus to painting, predominantly creating ethereal, enigmatic figurative works. These paintings evoked the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century decadence, often depicting listless figures inhabiting bright environments. He employed oxidized iron powder on his canvases, giving them a luminescent appearance that would gradually degrade.
Mackinven’s final solo exhibition, “Numble Bound To A Stripped Standing Tree,” featured a series of untitled figurative paintings, at Maureen Paley in 2022. His work was also exhibited by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and TRAMPS in New York, among other galleries.
Alongside his painting practice, Mackinven dedicated time to teaching as a part-time lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and as a visiting lecturer at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His work is in the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s collection.
