Carol Rhodes’s small scale, quasi-documentary landscapes represent one of the most distinctive achievements in recent British art, unique both as propositions within postmodern painting and as reflections on our conception of and relationship to the world.
Describing her depictions of human intervention in the ‘natural’ environment, critic Tom Lubbock noted:
Carol Rhodes invents. She makes up parts of the world, conceives them, constructs them, without compunction. But her fictions are both free and unfree. The made-up is always entangled and in dialogue with the not-made-up. In the process of their making, at each level of their making, these paintings engage with the imagination and its limits, with matters of invention, design, manipulation, grasp – and what lies beyond grasp.
[Making it up. Tom Lubbock. Printed in Carol Rhodes, published by Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2007]
Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and spent her early years in India. She studied at Glasgow School of Art and lived and worked in Glasgow throughout her career, playing an important role in the cultural life of that city. In December 2013 she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and she died in December 2018.
The Carol Rhodes Estate, represented by Alison Jacques, London, works to preserve Rhodes’s legacy and make her art better known to a wider public.
This website provides an online resource for information about Rhodes’s work, including images, writings and other archive material, much of it previously unavailable. Its contents are designed to be complementary to those available on the Alison Jacques website: alisonjacques.com
Contact
Curator, Andrew Mummery. andrew@andrewmummery.co.uk
Administration. info@alisonjacques.com
Oil on board, 54 x 64 cm
The Bonnefanten Collection, Maastricht.
On show in Carol Rhodes, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 2 February – 5 May 2024
Film: Henry Coombes