Caragh Thuring. Photo by Owen Richards
Caragh Thuring’s paintings often feel like they have more in common with the world of moving images than with contemporary painting. “For me, constructing the work involves an editing process, which I can liken to making a film.” Indeed, the work occupies time as much as space. Her paintings unfold slowly in front of our eyes. Looking becomes an active process in which the viewer is required to piece together fragmented images and incomplete gestures in order to fill in the blanks.
On the walls of her East London studio, postcards featuring Old Masters’ paintings co-exist with cuttings from glossy fashion magazines. advertisements for Hervé Leger and Ralph Lauren from the 1990s have been carefully preserved, and the figures reappear as surreally rendered brick silhouettes in her recent paintings. “They’re such ridiculous and perfect images, and by painting them I am able to consume them.”
Thuring leaves her canvases unprimed, rejecting the conventional approach of “making a flat, white surface to obliterate with brush strokes”. Instead, she works with the surface, sometimes dyeing, printing and sewing the raw linen before she begins to paint. The largest work in her recent exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, “Golf” (2014), hung directly in front of the doorway, partially blocking the entrance and revealing a patchwork of stitched linen on its reverse. In an era when images are produced and consumed at ever-greater speeds, Thuring’s paintings literally stop the viewer in their tracks, slowing the speed of looking.
Taken from Sleek 45 – Silent Spring
Text by Katie Guggenheim
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