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 Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

About the Author

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic, art historian and poet. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, New York University, Goldsmiths College (University of London) and Yale University. He has been the art critic for The Nation since 2005. His essays have appeared in many other publications, including Flash Art (Milan), Artforum, the London Review of Books and Art in America. His books include The Widening Circle: Con sequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting and several volumes of poetry.

Reviews
'Gillian Carnegie's paintings are some of the most hypnotizing reflections on the modern world around; seemingly plain surfaces shimmer with something profoundly mysterious. Barry Schwabsky's account of the evolution of her work is both wonderfully informative and beautifully written. I unreservedly recommend it.' -- Jennifer Higgie * Editor at Large, Frieze *



Book Information
ISBN 9781848222694
Author Barry Schwabsky
Format Hardback
Page Count 144
Imprint Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd
Publisher Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd