Caragh Thuring 17 Nov 2016 - 21 Jan 2017 11 Duke Street, St James's 3 Duke Street, St James's

For her forth-coming show at Thomas Dane Gallery, Caragh Thuring (b.1972, Brussels) has collaborated with weavers from Suffolk and Belgium to create canvas woven with the images of her previous works. Many of the paintings in the exhibition utilize this fabric as their starting point, and over which she has continued to paint to create new works. This ground-breaking approach confusing handcraft and a mechanised industrial process brings to light Thuring’s sustained interest in seriality and self-repetition. Thuring traditionally builds her compositions from fragments. This new group of works is made up of looming submarines, oil-rigs and deep cold blue-blacks. Thuring arranges elements within the paintings, fragmented and abstracted, each supporting the next in a sequential framework.

Thuring’s work can be considered in the context of European painters of the previous century who experimented with deconstructing the apparatus of painting, exposing stretcher bars and beginning to use alternative textiles and fabrics as their canvas. Many of Thuring’s new woven works, painted tartans and brick patterned surfaces also seem to acknowledge German paintings of the 70s and 80s in their investigations into the recycling of popular images and the physical object of the painting itself.

By fabricating her own canvas, Thuring is able to start not from emptiness but from an already activated surface. In these over-painted woven surfaces Thuring takes on responsibility for all aspects of the physicality of her works, rather than simply relying on an established found surface material. She has long considered the intentionally unprimed and unpainted areas of her work (typically on plain linen) a more neutral origin than primed canvas, now with these woven surfaces she has perhaps found a more personal and loaded starting point.

Each mark is clearly considered and, though often gestural and free, only a minimum of intervention on the surface of the painting is necessary. These marks along with large areas of unpainted canvas clearly reveal her process and jar the paintings in and out of figurative focus.

The geological layering of imagery (woven and painted) creates a confusion of temporality and materials. The laborious process of weaving is contrasted with the spontaneity of Thuring’s brush-marks. This self- referential recycling of imagery allows Thuring to rework and reposition earlier paintings, as if the process of painting could be extended indefinitely:

‘It’s about economy of language – everything leads onto the next thing, you don’t want to arrive anywhere, there is no destination’.

Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels and lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Westminster Waste, 2016; The Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2014/15; Anthony Meier, San Francisco, 2013; Simon Preston Gallery, New York, 2011. Group exhibitions include Call and Response at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 2015; Live and Let Die at Modern Art, London, 2014; July at The Approach, London, 2014; Performer As Curator, The Lowry, Manchester, 2013; Troubling Space, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2012 and Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010. Her work is included in various international collections including Tate and the Zabludowicz Collections in the UK.

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