Image: HackelBury Fine Art, London
HackelBury Fine Art in London is showing 'Seven Stones', an exhibition of Ian McKeever photographs made at the Neolithic henge monument in Avebury, Wiltshire. The presentation runs until 1 August 2026, and the gallery describes the works as photographs made in 2017 with a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025. In the exhibition text, McKeever’s focus is not the site as a whole but the material presence of the stones themselves.
According to the gallery, the images reflect McKeever’s long-standing interest in the relationship between painting and photography, and in broader questions of presence and absence, time and materiality. Rather than treating Avebury as landscape or as a monumental overview, the photographs move close to individual stones, cropping tightly and circling them so that their mass, heft and density become the subject. The result, the gallery says, is a body of work concerned with the stones’ endurance and with a sense of time that is described as radically non-human.
The exhibition also places 'Seven Stones' within McKeever’s painting practice. HackelBury notes that the photographs emerge directly from that practice, and that photography serves as a kind of “reality check” for the artist. In this framing, painting allows presence to remain latent and indeterminate, while photography fixes a recognisable object, even as the gallery points out that a photograph, too, is an abstraction. The exhibition text connects this line of thought to McKeever’s monumental painting series 'Henge Paintings' from 2017 to 2022.
The gallery’s overview includes two statements attributed to McKeever: “It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself” and “It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me.” Those remarks are used on the exhibition page to underline the conceptual terrain of the project, which addresses how an image can point to physical presence without fully containing it.
HackelBury Fine Art, which is based at 4 Launceston Place in London, presents the exhibition as part of its current programme. The online overview describes 'Seven Stones' as a current exhibition, while the gallery’s related summer email notes that it is open until Saturday 1 August and that the gallery will then close for a summer break from 2 to 24 August. The email also points to a forthcoming show, 'William Klein: 100', opening on 9 September 2026.
The presentation at HackelBury is comparatively focused, built around a single site and a small set of related ideas, but the institutional context suggests a wider interest in photography’s links to other media and to art history. For McKeever, the Avebury stones become a way to test the limits of the photographic frame while keeping faith with the uncertainty of painting, from 9 June to 1 August 2026.
