The RHA Gallery is delighted to present Headland, Elizabeth Magill’s first large-scale exhibition in Dublin since 2003. Magill is one of her generation’s leading painters and this exhibition will present a body of new work and will introduce her developing practice to a new and established audience. Headland is a touring exhibition, initiated by Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA), with shows taking place to date in Limerick and the Wilkinson Gallery, London. Included in this iteration will be a number of additional works that have not previously been exhibited.
“A kind of concentrated ambiguity regarding the natural world …. characterizes Magill’s paintings. Throughout her career Magill has been drawn to the language of painting using nature and landscape. She draws from them a gorgeous and engrossing multiplicity of visual and sensory description” Declan Long.Magill’s work is redolent of her sense of place – the Glens of Antrim – which has preoccupied and informed her relationship with her native landscape and her visual response to it. Her approach to painting is always experimental, allowing for previous techniques to give way to newer ones to form an unfolding process. Magill explains that “although my work refers to landscape it is more like an exterior view, an attempt 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”.
As the late John Berger wrote in his last publication Landscape, ‘Sometimes a landscape seems less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place, landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal’.
IN CONVERSATION: Elizabeth Magill with Barbara Dawson, Director, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
5.30pm, Wednesday 31 January – Gallery I
This event will take the form of a walk through of the exhibition, with a selection of artworks being highlighted and discussed.
A DANCE RESPONSE: Tilting
1.30pm & 6pm, Wednesday 21 February – Gallery 1
Dancers Mary Nunan, Isabella Oberlander and Mary Wycherley respond to Elizabeth Magill’s exhibition. The performance is improvised and is a response to the people, spaces and places (both real and imagined) that Magill’s paintings evoke for them. Throughout the performance the audience is free to move around the space, to experience the dance and the paintings from different angles.
Duration 20 mins. No booking required
Tilting was commissioned by Limerick City Gallery of Art.
