The largest exhibition to date of work by Irish artist Elizabeth Magill, particularly featuring landscapes, demonstrating her confident experimental use of paint. Working always on the horizontal she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the surface of the canvas, a process that continues until she ‘discovers’ a latent image. One of the paintings shown at Ikon, Land of the Dusky Sow, 2003, for instance, depicts a cluster of trees formed from a purple bruising of paint that dominates the lower centre of the painting. Effectively a collision between abstracted mark-making and figuration, a certain friction is compounded by an aggressive and scarred painting surface.

Loaded with an overwhelming Romantic sensibility and sometimes consciously pushed to the near-point of kitsch, Magill’s is not an act of observational topography, but rather the stuff of imagination and memory. She explains, ‘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.’

Supported by the Cultural Relations Commitee, Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, Ireland.