In conversation with Kenneth Greiner
Residency Archive
Kenneth Greiner’s work unfolds with a quiet, magnetic force- its impact felt before it fully reveals itself.
During his experience at Hands-on Residency, Greiner developed a body of “anti-paintings” that resists the traditional logic of stretched canvas and instead embraces rupture, intuition, and the unruly intelligence of natural materials. Working outdoors with bark, jute, found fragments, and weather itself as collaborator, he crafts surfaces that blur camouflage, queer signaling, and ecological re-wilding into a single, charged language.
What makes Greiner’s approach compelling is the way it challenges cultural narratives- about beauty, authorship, vulnerability, and control- without ever becoming didactic. His works feel alive: porous to context, shaped by time, and attuned to the subtle negotiations we make in order to be seen, or to remain concealed.
The following exchange traces the conceptual frictions that animate Kenneth’s project, the shifting authority of painting, and the quiet revelations that arise when landscapes become co-authors.
Your recent works move away from the traditional, perfected surface of stretched canvas and toward what you call “anti-paintings.” How do you see this shift challenging the historical authority of the European painting tradition, and what kinds of viewer responses or expectations are you hoping to unsettle?
Here, I’m choosing to associate image-making within frames, especially neatly composed paintings on stretched canvas, as having something to do with the faculty of the mind, logic, and its supposed rationality, but also to the way rectangular plots of land are worked in agricultural settings. A painting, in this sense, can be a seen as a symbol for a visually-oriented, analytical society that has come to value its pursuit of belief, the virtues of certain ideologies, and the appearance of achievement over lived experience and understanding within more buried aspects of the human experience like the emotional or the spiritual dimensions. It’s less to do with unsettling or challenging authority carte-blanche and more to do with an attempt at re-balancing something that’s become almost invasive in its domination over other areas.
Re-wilding emerges as a conceptual parallel in your practice. In what ways does this ecological framework shape not only your choice of materials but also your understanding of how artworks might “return” to a more unruly, less domesticated form of expression?
I’ve worked for awhile to try and evoke wounding, using foraged and found materials to depict a fraught relationship between humans and the natural landscape, blurring the lines between those environments and our own human bodies, using fissures, cracks, bondage, and weathering to illustrate disassociation. I’ve focused a lot on using art to aid in my own healing, trying to create an atmosphere conducive for that work in perhaps more materially transcendent ways, but I don’t think I’ve looked so much at the awkward, speculative stages of re-growth. That’s where re-wilding comes in because the aesthetics of art often reflect the values of the society or the individual who makes it, consciously but also subconsciously. I feel drawn, inversely, and almost romantically, to the earth because it represents what has been removed from the cultures I have grown up in.
You speak about code switching, camouflage, and queer signaling as embedded in the material language of these works. Could you elaborate on how these ideas manifest physically in the surfaces, seams, and constructions of the pieces, and what forms of communication or miscommunication they open up?
There are two levels to this, but in the details of these works, there are painted sections that layer over and mimic the textures of the surfaces they’re on. Charcoal and oil paint are used to highlight or visually quiet down sections of the pre-existing patterns in the bark, but also in the stripes on the twigs, and blackened sections of wood. Rather than paving over the top of any areas entirely, even the most affected areas are allowed to shine through, making it difficult, at a glance, to discern what’s “natural” or not. It’s a kind of dialogue and negotiation that mirrors the daily choices of queer and vulnerable people in how they present themselves in spaces, but also in animal prey, in unsafe environments, in the presence of predators. I think the works move within a noticeable spectrum of visibility with different amounts of conformity to the traditions of painting, with Passing and Through being somewhere in the middle and Hybrid Fields more diverging.
The use of bark, jute, antique nails, and foraged fragments introduces both folk and colonial histories into the work. How do you navigate the tension between the poetic possibilities of these materials and the sociopolitical baggage they carry, particularly when referencing beautification, social status, and palatability?
It’s tricky because, like words and spoken language, we have competing, contemporary relationships to things like materials and objects and then we have older, regional ways of seeing those same things that might be informed by folk stories, or belief systems that have fallen into disuse, raising the question of which meaning is the “correct” one and who gets to be the authority on that correctness, but I do a fair amount of research so that I can try to understand how objects might be read from various lenses.
Usually, I am drawn to materials or objects based on an intuition that somehow that piece will get me closer to the essence I’m trying to isolate, but what seems to grab my attention most are things with layers and hybridity because that creates an opportunity to sense the gap between contradictions, to look at the movement and evolution of beliefs rather than take them entirely at face value. I find that allows for discussions to be had with a bit of perspective and levity about them and then, if pain or difficult emotions arise in the process, there is space to unpack and learn about what’s going on in a safe, regulated way.
The works were constructed outdoors and allowed to undergo environmental exposure. How does this collaboration with weather, decay, and chance alter your relationship to authorship and control, and what does it mean for you to create paintings that are in some sense co-produced by the landscape?
The decision to call them “anti-paintings” came, in the end, from the idea of the femme fatale of noir films, the anti-hero, or the unreliable narrator of a written story. So, these compositions don’t attempt to function as paintings traditionally do, but they occupy the same positioning, albeit behaving in a different way. They accommodate and work through, rather than imagine drastic outcomes and exclude disagreement. They don’t toil over rendering ideas in a rigid fashion, they represent collective, holistic responses to pre-existing forces and bodies that move at different paces. It’s a gray area. I always liken the process to making music with others because with sound it becomes obvious quite quickly that harmony happens best when you listen to what’s going on around you and play to the acoustics of the room. It’s a different attitude altogether that’s not as concerned with ownership, but more so with conversation between parts.
Kenneth Greiner (b. 1990, USA) is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, painting, and writing. He holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, where he also completed a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art, following earlier training in cinematography at Chapman University. His practice emerges from land-based research, cross-cultural study, and iterative experimentation, forming a body of work rooted in spiritual inquiry and ecological attunement.
Drawing from Western folk belief and Eastern, earth-centered traditions, Greiner investigates how religious trauma, inherited binaries, and systems of gender and sexuality shape human perception. Through meditative immersion in place and material, he seeks to reorient these conditioned frameworks, visualizing alternative modes of harmony and embodied presence. His works often unfold as transient or cyclical arrangements- ranging from hand-sized charms and talismanic sculptures to shrine-like installations- created from locally foraged organic matter, found objects, and quietly transformative gestures. These environments invite viewers into moments of stillness, intuition, and recalibration.
Greiner’s work has been recognized through the Chanel Sculpture Studio Prize shortlist (2025) and residencies including UEL Docklands (2024), St Briavels Castle (2025), and the Trove Project at Deanna Evans Projects in New York (2023). His installations and sculptural works have been exhibited in London and New York at venues such as Purist Gallery, Safehouse, The Factory, Tae Projects, and Roha Gallery, alongside group exhibitions across Canada and the United States.