A crop of a Carol Rhodes painting, a large house with surrounding forest area

Carol Rhodes:
Survey
Curated by Andrew Mummery

This is the first solo presentation of Carol Rhodes’ work in Ireland, and her most extensive exhibition since the mid-career retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, in 2007.

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Date:	30 Jun 2017 - 8 Oct 2017
Time:	10am - 7pm, 7 days a week
Space:	Tall Gallery
Price:	Free admission

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Details

Over the past twenty-five years, Rhodes has produced a body of paintings and drawings rich in resonance and complexity. Assimilating influences from photography on one hand to pure abstraction on another, her work finds a unique territory within contemporary painting and drawing.

Get more out of your visit to the MAC by purchasing an exhibition audio guide, specially produced by our Curators. Priced at just £3, the guide takes you on a tour of our three current exhibitions, giving unique insight into the artists and works on display. The guide can be purchased from our Box Office on arrival and downloaded directly onto your phone.Rhodes’ landscapes are fictional syntheses resulting from a re-mixing of readymade imagery. Drawing from an eclectic range of photographic material, she combines fragments from different sources to create compositions that become the skeleton for her paintings.

Rhodes makes small-scale paintings which depict the interaction of natural geography and human intervention. Her paintings often place us on or near the edge of urban environments, seen from an aerial viewpoint, eerily distant from the world below. There is a mismatch between the vast landscapes depicted and the tiny scale and detail of the paintings, while symbols of mobility – airports or motorways – are curiously stilled and empty.

Born in Edinburgh, the artist was brought up in Bengal, near Kolkata, and the surroundings of her early life have had an enormous influence on her. Many other factors have fed into her visual language, from Medieval Italian painting and Indian court miniatures to Science Fiction literature – all of which might be said to share a peculiar, controlled divergence from naturalism.

“The first city I knew was Calcutta. I grew up in an industrial town nearby. Recently a friend who had visited there showed me a photograph of Calcutta taken from a high building. I was taken aback to see the ingredients of my paintings laid out: the faded pinks and greens and the flat roofs of the seaside architecture I’m drawn to.”
Carol Rhodes

As well as rarely seen early paintings, Carol Rhodes: Survey includes a number of drawings that have never been exhibited before. This exhibition reveals just how individual Rhodes’ achievement is in current painting.

Audio guide

Get more out of your visit to the MAC by purchasing an exhibition audio guide, specially produced by our Curators. Priced at just £3, the guide takes you on a tour of our three current exhibitions, giving unique insight into the artists and works on display. The guide can be purchased from our Box Office on arrival and downloaded directly onto your phone.

Image credit: Town, Oil on board, 2005 (City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries)

About the Artist

Carol Rhodes

Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and spent her childhood in Bengal, India. Between 1977 and 1982 she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been exhibited widely since the mid-1990s. In 2007, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh presented a survey exhibition of her paintings, accompanied by a monograph. Her work is included in the collections of major museums in the UK and the United States. Carol Rhodes lives and works in Glasgow.

Meet the Curator

Andrew Mummery

Andrew Mummery is an independent curator and art advisor. Between 1996 and 2014 he set up and ran two contemporary art galleries in London - the Andrew Mummery Gallery and Mummery + Schnelle. His work is based on the belief that the value of art lies in its ability to create expressive meaning and that it has a fundamental role as a means of communication and as a form of critical dialogue with the world.