Description

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b. 1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades, but this is the first substantial publication on her work. Carnegie's work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique, in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude--all of them "genres without a subject," as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie's paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting her work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.