Unofficial War Art: Radford and Kennard

An outpouring of art from two British artists has particularly caught my attention during the past two years. This art represents a sustained and visceral response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The first artist is Matthew Radford who studied at St Albans School of Art and Camberwell School of Art in the 1970s. Matthew has worked for decades as an artist and has exhibited widely in the UK, also having solo shows in Los Angeles, New York, California, and Germany.

Since the start of the attacks on Gaza, Matthew has been painting scenes inspired by newspaper and social media coverage. His intuitive, impressionistic style produces images that are striking and rough, similar to sketches or cartoons. He paints the suffering of the people as they clamber through the ruins or as they crouch in the shadow of overhead jets. He also satirises the leaders in suits who personify evil in their complicity with Israeli crimes.

The works have accumulated on a day by day basis so that there must now be hundreds of them. I’m certain they will one day appear in a monumental book that will summarise the horrors of these times, a modern day version of Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’.

Matthew Radford’s Instagram page

The second artist is Peter Kennard, a veteran of war protest art over many decades. His recent works continue his use of photomontage to produce powerful images of the starvation and militarism that combined to produce such atrocious conditions over the past two years in Gaza.

In 2023 he produced poster art for the Stop The War coalition featuring the Palestinian flag, the red portions turning to a trickle of blood. Of his work he says: “My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society. Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on… my aim is to unmask the connection.”

In the second half of 2024, his work was on show at Whitechapel Gallery in London. And then in August 2025, he exhibited new works related to Gaza at an exhibition at The Palestine Museum in Edinburgh. Until 18th October 2025, his work is also appearing with three other artists at Four Corners Gallery in London in an exhibition simply called ‘Gaza’.

Peter Kennard web site

Jonathan Wonham (author of poetry books Ceasefire Now! and Dystopia Persecutia)