Elizabeth Magill

Biography

Magill 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, and has recently made an excursion into video, her primary fidelity has been to the medium of painting, in all its bewildering variety. Over the past few years her typically idiosyncratic revisioning of the tradition of the romantic sublime has resulted in a series of hauntingly distressed paintings of the landscape. 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.

She has had one-person exhibitions at various venues in Ireland, Britain, Germany, France and Spain, including Southampton City Art Gallery in 1998; Kerlin Gallery in 1999; Wilkinson Gallery London in 2002, 2008; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Dublin in 2003 and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Baltic, Gateshead and Milton Keynes Gallery in 2004. She has held fellowships at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool and Saarlandisches Kunstlerhaus, Saarbrücken, Germany. Selected group exhibitions include 'Places in Mind', (with Adam Chodzko and Stan Douglas), Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast 2000, and '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 Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin the Arts Council of England, Southampton City Art Gallery, the British Council, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Themes and techniques

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 Caspar 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

Magill has held fellowships at the Tate Liverpool and Saarlandisches Kunstlerhaus, Saarbrücken, Germany. Her work has also featured in several group exhibitions, including

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.