Elizabeth Magill

BALTIC presents the most comprehensive exhibition of work to date, by acclaimed artist, Elizabeth Magill. Best known for her experimental landscape paintings in oil, Magill continually invents and re-invents her use of paint. This exhibition includes a large selection of recent paintings, which demonstrate the artist’s intense understanding of her chosen medium and her desire to test the limits of what is possible with paint on canvas.

Incorporating abstract mark making with figurative painting, Magill’s paintings have a haunting beauty, infused with a sense of memory and loss. She uses a range of photographic techniques as inspiration, the process often beginning with a photograph of a place she has visited. Through methods of pouring, dripping and rubbing colour into her canvases, Magill’s finished paintings appear weathered and distressed. For example, in Land of the Dusky Sow (2003), a cluster of trees is formed from a purple bruising of paint that dominates the centre of the painting and typically, spatters of yellow and orange paint flecks dance on the surface.

Both lyrical and melancholic, Magill’s works are not transcriptions of the real world, but are drawn ultimately from her own imagination and memories – particularly those of the glens and coastline of County Antrim, Northern Ireland where she spent most of her childhood. Magill comments, ‘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’.

This exhibition is produced by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and can be seen in BALTIC’s ground floor art space from 2 October – 28 November.

Elizabeth Magill was born in Canada. She studied at the Belfast College of Art & Design in 1982, followed by an MA at the Slade School of art in 1984; she has lived and worked in London ever since.

A fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Andrew Wilson and Tim Etchells accompanies the exhibition and is available from the BALTIC shop.

Pressetext

Elizabeth Magill - Recent Paintings
Ground Floor