Carol Rhodes (born Edinburgh, 1959) is one of the finest painters working in Britain.

This exhibition, the largest survey to date of Rhodes' paintings, features almost fifteen years of work, exploring her distinctive approach to landscape and ongoing investigation into her medium.

Working slowly, in oil on board, she depicts 'functional' landscapes manipulated by human activity - industry, landscaping, transport and quarrying. These terrains are distilled from imagined, observed and photographed views, with high viewpoints suggesting clarity and logic yet also unreality and disorientation. Recalling a range of art-historical precedents from early Netherlandish pictures to Indian miniatures, these paintings have an intensity and metaphoric richness that belies their apparent reserve.

Rhodes studied at Glasgow School of Art and is based in Glasgow. This is her first solo museum show, and it is marked by a publication with texts by Tom Lubbock and Merlin James.

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Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Medium

    Refers to either the material used to create a work of art, craft or design, i.e. oil, bronze, earthenware, silk; or the technique employed i.e. collage, etching, carving. In painting the medium refers to the binder for the pigment, e.g. oil, egg, acrylic dispersion. The plural form is media.

  • Oil

    A medium in which ground pigments are mixed to produce a paste or liquid that can be applied to a surface by a brush or other tool; the most common oil used by artists is linseed, this can be thinned with turpentine spirit to produce a thinner and more fluid paint. The oil dries with a hard film, and the brightness of the colour is protected. Oil paints are usually opaque and traditionally used on canvas.