About my Work

Martin Kinnear (born 1969, Burnley; lives and works in London, UK) is a contemporary painter exploring material, agency, and the shifting positions of painting today. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and a Médaille d’Argent laureate at the Paris Salon, his work is held in the UK Government Art Collection and other public and private collections.

Kinnear’s practice foregrounds material exploration, incorporating oil alongside limestone dust, aggregates, and other local substances as cyphers of geological time set against the brevity of human memory. Monumental in scale and sculptural in intent, his works emerge through an iterative process of drawing, layering, erasure, and reconstitution. Figures dissolve and reassert themselves within shifting grounds, creating images that remain ambiguous and resistant to closure.

Rooted in expressive figure drawing yet continually sublating figuration into and out of abstraction, Kinnear’s practice grants material its own agency. The painted surface becomes a site of negotiation rather than depiction, where form is emergent, contingent, and open to perception. In dialogue with Prof. Johnny Golding’s concepts of imminence and emergent temporality, Kinnear positions painting as an unfolding event in which matter and memory collide, and time itself becomes material.