Audio Transcript: Gillian Carnegie introduction

Verity S:
This is Gillian Carnegie’s room. She’s been shortlisted for the Turner Prize for her work exploring the properties of painting. Her subjects fit loosely into the traditional art-historical categories of landscape, still-life, the nude, and portraiture. And she paints in a wide range of styles and techniques. But her work questions the activity and history of painting as well as being immersed in it.

The work we’re focusing on in this room is the large square black painting, called Black Square. If you’d like to hear from Turner Prize judge Louisa Buck on Black Square, and why the judges nominated Gillian Carnegie’s work, press 30 and play. Gillian Carnegie herself prefers not to be interviewed. Instead, to hear Tate curator, Lizzie Carey-Thomas on Black Square’s historical roots, press 35 and play.

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Audio Transcript: Louisa Buck - judge - on Gillian Carnegie

Louisa B:
“Gillian Carnegie’s paintings use the most traditional of subject matter - she’ll paint still-lives, landscapes, flower-arrangements, the female nude. Very traditional but she’s by no means a traditional artist because she’s also interrogating and questioning those kinds of subject-matters and she’s also working through all sorts of different painterly styles. Now again, this isn’t just to give a kind of hit-parade of different methods it’s also to really look at and examine what kind of techniques give which kind of atmospheres and effects. So you can have really extraordinary gluey, thick, tarry paint quality as in Black Square. But then in other works she might use very thin washes or chalky, dabbing textures - all sorts of different methods, often within the same painting. So she’s really looking at what paint can be made to say and do, and what it has said and done, and how that can be applied now.

So it’s very complex the way she works with paint, it’s very ambiguous - there’s no easy readings, and every time you think you’ve kind of got the message she’ll wrong-foot you in some way. And we really liked that and she seemed to us to be saying really fresh, complex things with paint while acknowledging all the kind of mass of art history therein.” (1’18”)

Verity:
If you’d now like to hear Turner Prize curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas, on the art-historical link between Black Square and an avant-garde Russian painting made before the First World War, press 35 and play.

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Audio Transcript: Lizzie Carey-Thomas - Curator comment - Gillian Carnegie

Lizzie C-T:
“If you look at Carnegie’s Black Square paintings on first appearance all you see is a black, impenetrable mass of paint. When you look a bit more closely you see that a woodland scene’s actually constructed out of the dense impasto, almost in relief. The title and format of the painting is a deliberate reference to Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s black square on white ground of 1913. The monochrome came to stand throughout the twentieth century as heralding the end of representational painting. But here Carnegie twists this macho tradition of grandiose statements by planting the most conventional of subject matters at its heart - a woodland scene.

Nearly all her work Gillian Carnegie capitalizes on the tension between the subject matter - what she’s depicting - and the materiality, physicality, of the paint itself. So, while we’re drawn into the images through her painterly dexterity and the fact that we’re looking at figurative images which represent, or seem to represent, something in the world, we’re also constantly reminded that they’re constructed images through paint, that they’re artificial, they’re not real.” (1’10”)

Verity:
And if you’d now like to hear Turner Prize judge, Louisa Buck, on why Gillian Carnegie’s work has been nominated for this year’s prize, press 30 and play.

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