Menashe Kadishman - Fallen Leaves (1997-2001)
The Israeli sculptor and painter is perhaps best known for his sheep portraits (three years working as a shepherd can be blamed). But his most powerful work is this installation in Berlin's Jewish Museum. The visitor is invited to walk over 10,000 open-mouthed faces cut from heavy iron plates, evoking the Holocaust. It is a moving, unforgettable experience. (MB)
Freda Kahlo - My Nurse and I (1937)
The adult-faced Kahlo baby is being suckled by an Indian wet-nurse wearing an Aztec mask. The metal panel format emulates Mexican devotional icons. Yet any hope of spiritual salvation seems distant, as maternal sanctuary and ritual suffering are ambiguously merged and a looming sky turns grey with tears. (RC)
Wassily Kandinsky - Composition VI (1913)
The word 'flood' comes to mind to describe the overwhelming creative onrush of this three-metre-wide abstraction. It has the grandeur of a mountain landscape, the colours of a rainbow, the rhythms of music, the mass of a cathedral. (JJ)
On Kawara - Date Paintings (ongoing)
In 1966 the enigmatic conceptual artist On Kawara embarked on his epic Todays, in which he paints on a monochrome field the day's date according to the conventions of the country he is in. This daily memorial to time passing and to the artist's existence has to be completed by midnight or it is destroyed. (JL)
Patrick Keiller - Robinson in Space (1997)
'Sitting comfortably, I open my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life.' So begins Keillerís video tale of a 'peripatetic study of the problem of England' conducted by the deadpan Robinson and his long-suffering mate. Paul Scofield, in impeccably droll old-time BBC elocution, narrates a series of illuminating snippets of information as the itinerant camera focuses on one provincial backwater after another. The cultural references build up: Arthur Rimbaud, Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde, Adam Ant. It's like being lucky enough to get stuck on a train next to somebody's utterly erudite and slightly potty grandfather. If you sometimes get fed up with the state of England, watch this. It won't change a thing, other than cheering you up no end. (RC)
Ellsworth Kelly - Colours for a Large Wall (1951)
This big painting actually consists of 64 separate square panels each painted a single colour and arranged on principles of chance in a beautiful game of chess. (JJ)
Anselm Kiefer - Book with Wings (1992-1994)
A metal book flies like an eagle in one of Kiefer's ambiguous monuments to the 20th century. The soaring book is surely an image of free thought, but metal is heavy, and the eagle has grave associations in Germany. (JJ)
Edward Kienholz - The Beanery (1965)
There's the wasted women dolled up in rat-eaten furs, the men propping up the bar stuck with stopped clocks for faces. There's a stench of stale spilt beer and a buzz of chattering and clinking of empty glasses. A universe away, the Vietnam war burned on. (RC)
Paul Klee - Cat and Bird (1928), Letter Ghost (1937)
Klee is a giant of the modern imagination. His painting of a cat with a bird in its mind is at once a scientific speculation - is this how cats think? - and an uneasy allegory. The unease has deepened by the late 1930s with his Letter Ghost; a letter from the dead, or someone he might never see again. (JJ)
Kitagawa Utamaro - Coquettish Type, from Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy (1802), The Hour of the Snake, from Women at Various Hours of the Day (c1800)
Considered to be the greatest artist of woodblock prints, Kitagawa is most famous for his many studies of beautiful women and erotic imagery. The evocative albums in which he set out to capture all facets of the female psyche had a huge impact on western artists, and in particular the portraits of Henri Matisse. (JL)
Yves Klein - Leap into the Void (1960)
Arms outstretched as if taking off in flight, the French actionist painter Yves Klein jumps from a second-floor window. This photomontage, made with the aid of American photographer Harry Shrunk, has come to signify man's defiance in the face of his destiny. (JL)
Gustav Klimt - Judith und Holofernes (1901), The Kiss (1908)
Klimt's golden world of mosaic colours floats in a space without boundaries in The Kiss, and yet its utopia of desire is only one side of an artist who acknowledges the destructive as well as fulfilling power of sexuality. (JJ)
Max Klinger - Rescue (1881)
The story goes that Klinger dreamed up his etching series The Glove in yearning for an instantly lost love-at-first-sight beauty glimpsed disappearing at a roller-skating rink. The coquettishly dropped glove suffers all kinds of tribulations as it fails to be reunited with its owner. (RC)
Jeff Koons - Ushering in Banality (1988), Puppy (1992), Sandwiches (2000), Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994-2006)
There's a possibility that the art of Jeff Koons will be remembered when many things that seem more serious and significant - and, for that matter, more 'cutting-edge' - are forgotten. Certainly his stupendous and delightful gigantic puppy made of flowers, permanently installed outside the Guggenheim Bilbao like art-world topiary, is a far better work of art in every way than the boring Louise Bourgeois spiders outside the same establishment. Koons is a wonderful artist - a totally unique revealer of beauty in the stupidest regions of modern culture, yet at the same time a sneaky satirist who may be mocking our indulgence of him. His masterpiece, Ushering in Banality, can be seen as a dumb hymn to our time - or the very opposite.
Koons is also a fabulous painter, or fabulous causer of paintings to be made. The energy and delirium of the paintings he unveiled at the Berlin Guggenheim in 2000 have to be seen to be believed - these contemporary reinventions of the Baroque rejoice in gooey food and shiny bodies and make other artists' efforts to reinvent Pop painting look drab. His beautiful reflective blue egg is another work that has its heart in the Baroque, its feet in a chocolate box. Koons was a provocateur with no rivals in the 1980s; he still is. (JJ)
Oskar Kokoschka - Bride of the Wind (1914)
Painted as a memorial to his affair with Alma Mahler, the composer Gustav Mahler's dangerous-to-know widow. Set adrift in a tempestuous sea, the couple appear doomed to impassioned sadness. While admittedly now appearing so unfashionably romantic, Kokoschka's convulsive image remains a poignant embodiment of love's passing. (RC)
Käthe Kollwitz - The Weavers (c1894)
Inspired by the Weavers' Rebellion of 1844, in which the Prussian army brutally repressed unrest among textile workers, Käthe Kollwitz produced a series of politically charged etchings illustrating the plight of the workers and their eventual doom. A committed socialist, Kollwitz produced some of the most affecting depictions of poverty in the 19th century. (JL)
Leon Kossoff - Man in Wheelchair (1959-1962)
Born on the City Road, Islington, in 1926, Kossoff is a painter who has found a lifetime's material in the grainy textures and atmospheres of east London. But he is also an archaeologist of the human soul, and his Man in Wheelchair, its oil paint thickly impastoed, is a study in raw emotion. (CH)
Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989)
Designed originally as a poster for a pro-choice rally, Kruger's best known work exemplifies the body politics of much 1980s feminist art. It incorporates elements that were, at the time, startlingly radical: addressing women directly as 'you'; featuring women as art subject rather than object; political appropriation of images; and a feisty tone that certainly meant business. (EM)
Yayoi Kusama - Fireflies on the Water (2002), Infinity Mirror Room (1995)
Yayoi Kusama's art has an intense psychedelic intensity that is inspired by hallucinations she had as a child. Obsessional to the point of mania, her installations combine the vibrancy of Pop art with a deeply personal embodiment of the human psyche. Characterised by giant polka dots, usually in red, yellow and black hues, Kusama constructs temporary mirrored rooms that seem to contain unbound, endless spaces. (JL)
