Herbert Read described it as the moment of liberation. ‘Once it is accepted’, he wrote, ‘that the plastic imagination has at its command, not the fixities of a perspectival point of view…but the free association of any visual elements (whether derived from nature or constructed apriori), then the way is open to an activity which has little correspondence with the plastic arts of the past.’ Writing in 1959, Read defined the trajectory in modern painting which sprang from the experiments in ‘pure art’ conducted by Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky and others at the end of the first decade in the twentieth century. Their innovations would lead to the flowering of abstract painting, a means of expression unburdened by ‘an irrelevant representational function’. Freed from imitating the observed world, henceforward artists could construct non-representational structures that would, it was assumed, ‘appeal directly to human sensibility1. As Read’s words suggest, such ideas had a heady significance but also posed profound questions, not least concerning the capacity of abstract painting to transcend its own formal means. Can non-figurative art – a visual language of marks, shapes and colours – truly serve as a vehicle for meaning, and, if so, what exactly is being conveyed? Over a hundred years later, such questions still provoke debate. In that context, the work of Ian McKeever constitutes a compelling affirmation of abstract painting’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century.