Programs / Programmi
7th Artists Intenational Print Project. Elizabeth Magill
Venice, August 2008
A principal theme of Magill’s work is “hauntingly distressed paintings of the landscape”. For recent work, the creation process begins with a photograph which is scanned and the resulting image sprayed on canvas before being overpainted with oils to add highlights and contrast. The result has been compared stylistically with that of the German Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840). She has described her work as: “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.”
Apparent influences are the glens and coastline of Northern Ireland, where she spent most of her childhood, but the emptiness of the landscapes themselves is generally tempered by empty houses, electricity pylons, and the like, giving a sense of absence of human life and wistful isolation.
Exhibitions
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 prominent younger British artists to a wider public.
She has had one-person exhibitions at various venues throughout Western Europe including
1998 – Southampton City Art Gallery
1999 – Kerlin Gallery
2002 – Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London
2003 – Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York
2003 – Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin
Magill has held fellowships at the Tate Liverpool and Saarlandisches Kunstlerhaus, Saarbrucken, Germany. Her work has also featured in several group exhibitions, including
2000 – ‘Places in Mind’, (with Adam Chodzko and Stan Douglas), Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast
2000 – ‘Premio Michetti 2000′ at Fondazione Michetti, Italy.
Magill is represented in many public and private collections worldwide including those of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council of England, Southampton City Art Gallery, the British Council and the National Gallery of Australia.
In 2006 Sotheby’s Auction House reported achieving a record price for Magill’s work at an auction of Irish Artists.