John Granville Colpoys Keane is a British artist, whose paintings have contemporary political and social themes.
Life and work
John Keane was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England. He was educated at Wellington College and Camberwell School of Art. He is a political painter, whose subjects often concern contentious political, social and military issues. In 1990, the Imperial War Museum commissioned him as an official war artist in the Gulf War. 2001-02, he exhibited paintings which were derived from an expedition with Greenpeace during their campaign in the Amazon against illegal logging. In 2002, he painted Mo Mowlam, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The original idea was to represent her with other major figures in the Good Friday Agreement, but four years of talks as to where the individuals should be placed ended with Trimble's withdrawal and the plan was abandoned. In 2004, he toured his show, The Inconvenience of History, internationally. This was based on trips in liaison with Christian Aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also worked on paintings about the 2002 Moscow Theatre siege, using documentary footage as a source: "The process has continued my methods of developing the imagery with the aid of a computer, prior to committing paint to canvas in works both large and small scale." In 2006, 57 Hours in the House of Culture was a show at Flowers East gallery, London, and Sakharov Museum, Moscow, about the Chechen War. His more recent work, Guantanamerica, bases paintings about "issues of representation and dehumanisation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay" on low resolution internet files. In 2010, he became known for a commissioned portrait of the former Secretary General of the UNKofi Annan. In November 2019, along with other public figures, Keane signed a letter supporting Labour Party leaderJeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election. He is a visiting research fellow at Camberwell College of Arts.
