The largest exhibition to date of paintings by London-based Irish artist Elizabeth Magill, it constitutes a comprehensive survey of her work from the past ten years. Magill shows remarkable innovation in her use of paint, revelling in a confident and experimental treatment of the picture surface. Often working on the horizontal she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the surface of the canvas, a process of discovery until she literally 'finds' the latent image.
Both Galleries
The largest exhibition to date of paintings by London-based Irish artist Elizabeth Magill, it constitutes a comprehensive survey of her work from the past ten years.
Magill shows remarkable innovation in her use of paint, revelling in a confident and experimental treatment of the picture surface. Often working on the horizontal she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the surface of the canvas, a process of discovery until she literally 'finds' the latent image. In her recent painting, Land of the Dusky Sow 2003, for instance, a cluster of trees is formed from a purple bruising of paint that dominates the lower part of the painting. Revolving around a collision between abstracted mark-making and figuration, this friction is often compounded by an aggressive and scarred painting surface.
Loaded with an overwhelming Romantic sensibility and sometimes consciously pushed to the near-point of popular kitsch, Magill's is not an act of transcribing the real; rather it is the stuff of imagination and memory. I'm not so much painting what is there but what I imagine might be there. These works are not landscapes as such, but more like suggested backdrops to how I feel, think and interpret the world.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Andrew Wilson and Tim Etchells. Exhibition supported by the Cultural Relations Committee, Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, Ireland.
Image: Full moon over Siberia 2002
ikon-gallery
1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace
Birmingham