Description
Book SynopsisThe singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work.
Carnegie’s work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude – all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie’s paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado.
In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.
Trade Review'Gillian Carnegie’s paintings are some of the most hypnotizing reflections on the modern world around; seemingly plain surfaces shimmer with something profoundly mysterious. Barry Schwabsky’s account of the evolution of her work is both wonderfully informative and beautifully written. I unreservedly recommend it.' -- Jennifer Higgie * Editor at Large, Frieze *
Table of ContentsI A Weird Time to be a Painter; II What Images Tell Us; III Between Observation and Experience; IV An Absolute Object; V A Needless Bit of Sensationalism; VI Filling the Space with Miniature Abstractions; Notes; Acknowledgements; Biography; Solo Exhibitions; Group Exhibitions; Other Projects; Public Collections; Bibliography; Index
