Ikon gallery

"The largest exhibition to date of paintings by London-based Irish artist Elizabeth Magill, it constitutes a comprehensive survey of her work from the past ten years.

Magill shows remarkable innovation in her use of paint, revelling in a confident and experimental treatment of the picture surface. Often working on the horizontal she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the surface of the canvas, a process of discovery until she literally ‘finds’ the latent image. In her recent painting, Land of the Dusky Sow 2003, for instance, a cluster of trees is formed from a purple bruising of paint that dominates the lower part of the painting. Revolving around a collision between abstracted mark-making and figuration, this friction is often compounded by an aggressive and scarred painting surface."

This is where we went, where the artist seems to specialise in tiny birds flying high above the subjects in the paintings, reminding me of The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams (read about it here). She has some immensely huge works which are impressive in the subtlety of transitions in light as well as the contrasts of colour - showing often black foregrounds of trees and houses, with the lingering light of summer receding in the background.