LONDON.- For her new exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Caragh Thuring (b. Brussels, 1972) takes as the starting point her own painting, The Foothills of Pleasure (2022). Its title, a seemingly familiar literary reference, is in fact imagined by the artist to describe the geology of volcanic landscapes, as well as intensifying human passions. These foothills, fertile but perilous, are a place where life and death coexist and where rock is melted, folded and reformed in an endless cycle. 

Extruded from this original painting Thuring has created an array of new landscape works that adapt, repeat and recycle fragments from her highly personal visual language. Through this process of self-imitation, the new compositions share moments of connection, but also diverge profoundly, framing the same scene repeatedly but from different vantage points and ranges.

Alongside this volcanic series, and for the first time, Thuring has painted a group of portraits. These historical figures were all lovers of volcanoes, but also lovers in life: Lord Nelson, Emma and William Hamilton (the three of whom were entangled in a love affair) and Katia and Maurice Krafft (who perished together during an eruption in Japan). Conjured from varied existing portraits and painted sparsely to distil an imagined essence, these lovers cut across time and geography.

The works in the show have been painted on gessoed board, weavings and primed and bare linen, and include bespoke carved wooden frames. The visual components that find their way into Thuring's intentional and precise language are layered into different contexts over time and across multiple series. With these she creates a confusing sense of depth on the flat surfaces of the paintings: backgrounds overlay foregrounds and objects appear to reveal the space behind them. A cyclical geology operates within her work, which forces these constituent elements through a repeating gyration. Each element has come before, though its origin is obscured. 

Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the United Kingdom since 1973. Receiving a BA Hons in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 1995, she moved to London the same year and currently divides her time between London and Argyll in Scotland.

Thuring’s unique language relishes but undermines the inherent flatness of  painting, destablising  the viewer into reassessing how they have been conditioned to look and see. Never making preparatory drawings, Thuring paints fluidly and intuitively, building and arranging imagery in opposition to traditional visual and logical hierarchies. In a constant filtering of the world, her fractured compositions of people and places interweave history, the present and the future into a glimpsed experience that’s both technological and human. 

For recent works, Thuring has commissioned bespoke cloth to use as her canvas. Digital renderings of previous paintings, photographs she has taken, and found images are woven on a loom, sewn together and stretched before being painted onto - ‘I want to build the work into the surface, to continue the work I’ve already begun.’ 

In her series of window paintings, or ‘lateral portraits’ as the artist refers to them, window ledge displays reveal the self fashioning of the buildings’ unseen occupants. Thuring is curious about what lies beyond, out of sight, or beneath the surface, be it man-made, a person, or a landscape. Volcanoes, their geological structures, and nuclear submarines both reoccur in her work and further emphasise the clash of the natural and the manufactured.

Thomas Dane Gallery
The Foothills of Pleasure
May 24th, 2023 - July 15th, 2023