Place
The apprehended quality of place is to landscape what universality is to the figure: both are found not in likeness, but in recognition.
Landscape Series, 2019–2026
Across three major series, Martin Kinnear developed a landscape practice concerned with how place is experienced, remembered and remade through painting.
Fracture brought concerns from his figurative work into the landscape, using local materials, disrupted surfaces and shifting forms to explore presence, absence and change. Regeneration, initially conceived as a record of the North of England, was transformed by the pandemic into a broader meditation on resilience and community, culminating in a solo exhibition at The Bowes Museum. Beyond Here, made from Kinnear’s studio in the Yorkshire Dales, returned to the classical landscape tradition, testing its structures against the instability and material freedom of modern painting.
Together, these series treat landscape not as backdrop or description, but as a field in which memory, material, identity and time are held in tension.
Landscape Series selected works, 2022–2025
Fracture . 2025
Fracture situates Kinnear’s figural practice within landscape, exploring the liminality of place and people. Working with local materials and a philosophy of immanence, the series evokes time, presence, and the porous boundary between body and terrain.
Gallery of Selected Works
Regeneration . 2022
First comissioned as a personal record of northern landscapes, Regeneration became, under the pressures of COVID, a public gallery exhibition about resilience and community. Shown at The Bowes Museum, the series locates landscape as both witness and participant in collective endurance.
Beyond Here 2024
Beyond Here re-examines the classical landscape tradition from Kinnear’s Dales studio, situating it in contemporary dialogues of becoming. The series connects local terrain with Modernist traditions, interrogating how landscape can still articulate universal questions in painting.
Fracture Peinture à l’essence, Dales limestone, gloss and oil on canvas 2025 Exploring the liminality of place and people, Fracture uses local stone and layered surfaces to evoke presence, time, and the porous boundary between body and landscape.
Eroded Peinture à l’essence, Dales limestone, gloss and oil on canvas 2023 Exploring the liminality of place and people, Fracture uses local stone and layered surfaces to evoke presence, time, and the porous boundary between body and landscape.
Midsummer Peinture à l’essence, Dales limestone, gloss and oil on canvas 2023 Exploring the liminality of place and people, Fracture uses local stone and layered surfaces to evoke presence, time, and the porous boundary between body and landscape.
Martin Kinnear Congregation Oil on canvas 2022 Exhibited: Regeneration, The Bowes Museum, County Durham, 2022 Collection: University of Durham Art Collection In Congregation, place becomes inseparable from the people who inhabit it. The painting reflects the tragedy of the post-industrial North, where landscapes are also portraits of community, marked equally by resilience, memory, and loss.
Study for pandemonium Oil on canvas 2022 Exhibited: Regeneration, The Bowes Museum, County Durham, 2022
Beyond Here Oil and dry media on canvas 2018–2024 Landscape Painting Today, Messums, 2024; Re-examining the classical landscape tradition from his Dales studio, Beyond Here situates local terrain in contemporary dialogues of becoming and aligns it with the Modernist search for universality.
Burnsall Winter Oil on canvas 2018 Exhibited: Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris Salon, 2018 (Médaille d’Argent, Peinture) Burnsall Winter reflects Kinnear’s sustained engagement with the Yorkshire Dales, where tonal subtlety and layered surface evoke both atmosphere and geological presence. The work belongs to his exploration of landscape as an immanent field in which time, place, and perception converge. Exhibited at the Paris Salon in 2018, it was recognised with a Médaille d’Argent for painting, placing his North Yorkshire subject matter within an international dialogue of contemporary landscape practice.
Beyond Here Oil and dry media on canvas 2018–2024 Selected, Salon of 2018.