Since the mid 90s Magill has been primarily concerned with landscape painting.
At first, her interests focused on the representation of rural idylls
created from a combination of personal snap shots and images appropriated
from television or printed media. But the form of the work is equally
a product of process as it is of appropriation with the paintings being
returned to and developed over considerable time.
The places depicted seem as if on the border of memory - half remembered
- perhaps from childhood, perhaps fictional. There is a deeply romantic
resonance to the works which is enforced by the fact that they are located
in half light, the end or the very beginning of the day, when the colours
can seem at their most unnatural and forcing us to strain to see. This
combined with the intentional ambiguity of location pulls the work towards
an idealisation of painting, and pushes them towards an uncanny sublime.
More
recently Magill has taken her landscapes physically closer to the built
environment, but they are located at the edge of our intervention with
the land - in the no-mans-land of motorways, electricity pylons, broad
vistas at the outskirts of towns.
Elizabeth Magill showed new work for the intimate viewing space at Peer.
Forthcoming
exhibitions include The Glen Dimplex Award exhibition at the Irish Museum
of Modern Art, Dublin, May - Autumn 2001. She is represented by Kerlin
Gallery, Dublin.
A catalogue from Magill's solo exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery,
1999 is available with an essay The Lie of the
Land by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith.
Press
Time Out review
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Sky/Branch, 2000
Oil on canvas
4½' x 5'

Fota Park (Red), 2000
Oil on canvas
4' x 5'
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