Elizabeth Magill is one of her generation’s leading painters and this exhibition will present a body of new work and introduce her developing practice to a new and established audience.

Magill came to the attention of the art world in the early 90s with a major exhibition at the Arnolfini, Bristol, followed by prestigious group shows at Serpentine Gallery, London, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and the British Art Show. Magill has been the recipient of many significant awards and prizes over her 30 year career.

Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) initiated this exhibition to present a new body of work to a younger audience who may not be familiar with her work and for an established audience to have the opportunity to view new and recent work.

“A kind of concentrated ambiguity regarding the natural world….characterises Magill’s paintings.  Throughout her career Magill has been drawn to the language of painting using nature and landscape,  She “draws from them a gorgeous and engrossing multiplicity of visual and sensory ‘description'”
– Declan Long.

Magill’s work is redolent of her sense of place – the Glens of Antrim – which have preoccupied and informed her relationship with a sense of place and her visual response to it. Her approach to painting is always experimental, allowing for previous attempts to give way to newer ones to form an unfolding openness.

Magill explains that “although my work refers to landscape it is more like an exterior view, an attempt to create a setting or space to place things a kind of deposit of thoughts and observations within the framework of a personal and painting practice”

As the late John Berger wrote in his last publication Landscape,

‘Sometimes a landscape seems less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal’.

Elizabeth Magill (b. 1959, Canada) grew up in Northern Ireland but lives and works in London. She began exhibiting in the mid-1980s. She is a painter of prodigious versatility and inventiveness whose work has always drawn from a wide range of visual sources. While she has often integrated photographic materials and processes into her painting, in a number of novel ways, her primary fidelity has been to the medium of painting, in all its bewildering variety. Recently she has moved gradually away from her idiosyncratic revisioning of the tradition of the romantic sublime and entered a more personal zone creating a series of strange and compelling ‘mindscapes’. Her first major solo exhibition was at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 1990. In the same year she was included in the seminal British Art Show, which first introduced many of the most prominent younger British artists to a wider public.

Past solo exhibitions include Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2011), the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2003) and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Baltic, Gateshead, Milton Keynes Gallery and the Glynn Vivian Museum, Swansea

Magill is represented in many public and private collections worldwide including those of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing / Limerick City Gallery of Art; the Arts Council of England; the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Southampton City Art Gallery; the British Council and the National Gallery of Australia.

http://elizabethmagill.com