DUBLIN.- In these new paintings, Elizabeth Magill has developed a novel practice, combining painting, drawing, stencilling and large-scale printmaking to create sensual and engrossing landscapes rich in minute visual detail and expansive atmosphere and allusion.
Over her 30 year career, Magill has been celebrated for conjuring from memory, mysterious suburban roadsides, dark woodlands and evocative windswept coastlines. In this new body of work, such landscapes continue to take form but the visual and sensory experience is all the more intense.
While these paintings acknowledge environmental change, even catastrophe, there is an optimism, a light and a celebration forcing its way through. Magill's landscapes are both political and poetic. They form as the product of her acute attention to the detail and complexity of our surroundings and her unique. slanted and enchanted vision.
Magill's work is represented in many museum and public collections worldwide including those of TATE, London; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; The Arts Council of England; The Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; The British Museum, London; Towner Art Gallery & Museum, Eastbourne; Worchester Museum and Art Gallery; Southampton City Art Gallery; The British Council and the National Gallery of Australia.
KATHY PRENDERGAST
Road Trip
29 May 10 July 2021
Throughout her career Kathy Prendergast has received international critical acclaim for her work with cartography, often returning to the Atlas of North America and in particular the state of Minnesota. The map of this state, commonly known as the land of 10,000 lakes makes clear the contrast between our need for structure and order and the irregularity of millions of years of organic natural history. A uniform grid of road networks sits at odds with a landscape formed by volcanic eruption, carved by glaciers and defined by misshapen lakes and serpentine waterways. Prendergast has painted directly on the map itself, filling in the space between the roads, redacting nature with exuberant colour.
Prendergast transforms the map from a key to understanding how to navigate the Minnesota landscape to a kaleidoscopic abstraction celebrating the chaotic clash of two opposing orders.
Kathy Prendergast represented Ireland at the 46th Venice Biennale, 1995, for which she won the prestigious Premio Duemila Prize. In the 25 years since she has had significant museum exhibitions including Tate Britain (1997), The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2000), Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2016, 2006, 2003); Kunst-Station St. Peter, Cologne (2019) and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2015). Her ambitious 'Atlas' installation first shown at Kerlin Gallery (2016) has since been exhibited at Museum Morsbroich, Germany (2020); Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Köln, Germany (2019); MoMA Oxford (2018) and The Yokohama Triennale (2017).
Prendergast is represented in the public collections of TATE, London; the Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; Santa Barbara University Museum; the Albright-Knox, Buffalo; the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The Hugh Lane, Dublin and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, among others.