I’m gutted I never got to meet Kenneth O’Hare properly. I missed the chance to write about his work a few years ago in West Kirby too. In passing, he was warm and had a different way of looking at the world. That comes across through his work.
Bridewell’s first exhibition of 2026 is a retrospective of Kenneth O’Hare’s painting, running until the end of January.
His style shifted dramatically through series rather than time. There was one side of him focussed on the beauty of negative space, the other focussed on finding meaning in the dimmest of forms.
Brought together by his friends and peers, and hung by Tony Knox, Brian O’Hare and Fiona Filby, the exhibition promises to be the first of many, sharing a legacy of an artist who was notably under shown. There are works that are, if you’re even gently familiar with the local art scene, instantly recognisable as his. There are others that come as a surprise.
That’s magic. That an artist whose work is finished can still surprise his audience.
It’s difficult looking posthumously on a lifetime of work, and trying to find connections and difference. You just sort of second guess everything, with no real chance for answers. For example, I was confronted at first by work I’d never seen before. Work I wouldn’t have associated with him in a million years. Rich, moody, landscapes, broken down to expressions of form. But they’re punctuated by these huge blue canvases that take structure incredibly seriously.
Those blue work, the ones you’ll most likely know Kenneth O’Hare for, are monumental shrines to form. But, they’re also celebrations of how form, with the right materials, can obscure and energise life beyond.
You’ve got to give enough to this work that you notice it properly, but within every segment of the windows he paints, is a scene. Those scenes might be intensely minimal, or they might offer some hint of the world beyond. What they aren’t ever is figurative, or blatantly purposeful.
The third set of work, and the second that were unfamiliar to me, were the chairs. The negatives. The templated, restricted, chaos of play, contained by iconic chairs.
They’re incredibly aesthetic works, considered for saleability, but they come in essence from the same place of playful restraint as everything else in this exhibition, which is completely and utterly representative of a man who saw the world not differently, but more intensely, than most.
A Gentle Man: Retrospective of Kenneth O’Hare, open until 31st January 2026 at Bridewell Studios & Gallery
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
