Adam's Mid-Century Modern July 28th 2020

34 Tuesday 28 th July 2020 Although she was born in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth Magill grew up in Antrim and went on to study art in Belfast and at the Slade in London. She settled in London and has been based there since, though she does also spend time in Northern Ireland. Her considerable technical skill, pictorial flair and felicitous touch were recognised from early on; she won the prestigious GPA Award in 1983. From early on, as well, she has viewed painting as a visual and conceptual language, and she likes to explore its limits, especially in relation to the juggling of illusion and reality that representation involves. While landscape is in one sense her primary subject matter, and some of her work, especially in the recent past, does reference the Glens of Antrim (notably the paintings in Headland, her dazzling 2017-‘18 touring exhibition), she is not a landscape painter in the usual sense of the term. Generally, she has no interest in making repre- sentations of a particular, identifiable location. Rather she sets out, as she puts it: “to create a setting or space to place things, a kind of deposit of thoughts and observations within the framework of a personal and painting practice” – hence, it is worth noting, the double meaning implied in the title Headland In generating her settings or spaces, she often plays with convention. For example, a great deal of her work, as here, can be seen as being in part an ongoing dialogue with the Romantic tradition exemplified particularly by Casper David Friedrich. Her Sky View could be interpreted as a contemporary reworking of one of Friedrich’s evocations of the Sublime in splendid natural vistas. Where he put us in the position of a wanderer in the moun- tains, surveying a sea of clouds from a rocky promontory, Magill evokes the vantage point of an airplane pas- senger, suspended tens of thousands of metres above the earth and a carpet of candy-floss clouds, afforded a privileged glimpse of the Technological Sublime. Magill’s work is included in numerous collections, public and private, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. Aiden Dunne, June 2020 29 ELIZABETH MAGILL (B.1959) SKY VIEW, 1998 Oil on canvas, 152 x 183cms Provenance: With the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, label verso. € 7,000 - 10,000