Glasgow International and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum are delighted to announce a landmark exhibition of work by Carol Rhodes (b. Edinburgh 1959; d. Glasgow 2018). A Glasgow-based artist and influential figure at Glasgow School of Art, Rhodes was known internationally for her paintings of partly fictive, human-made landscapes.
This exhibition outlines the ways in which Rhodes used drawing as a means of translating and transforming photographic sources to create her highly individual paintings. Many of the drawings on show are cartoons for finished paintings – detailed preparatory studies that were used to transfer the composition onto the support of gessoed board. Among these there are examples for which no finished painting is known, including a four-foot high cartoon for what would have been Rhodes’s largest mature painting.
In addition, the show includes previously unseen preliminary studies and sketches recently discovered in the artist’s studio. These reveal how Rhodes’s drawing processes evolved over time and were more nuanced than hitherto realised. Displayed in a vitrine will be a selection of items from Rhodes’s studio including trial sketches, tracings and notebooks, printed books that were sources of images and inspiration, and photographs taken by Rhodes herself.
The exhibition meanwhile includes several important paintings, including three unique but key early works – Aeroplane (1993), Tent (1994) and Caravan (1994) – and three later paintings notable for their distinctive colour palettes and elevated viewpoints: Breach (2005), Pond Area (2009), and Open Ground and Mudflats (2009).
Connecting with Glasgow International festival’s theme of ‘attention’, the exhibition reveals a creative process both expansive and focused, attentive to method and form, at once rigorous and instinctual. The drawings and paintings invite close looking from the viewer, evincing the intense working and reworking at the heart of Rhodes’s practice. She mined various resources, from geography textbooks and environmental surveys to urban planning manuals and her own photographs taken from helicopters and planes. Her works focus on topographic blind spots and peripheries, ‘non-places’ such as service stations, airports, railway depots, development centres, trade parks and brown-field industrial belts. These are environments often associated with the flow of material and labour, storage and distribution, the extraction of natural resources, or the deposit of industrial waste and by-products. Human activity is everywhere, yet human beings themselves do not feature. The psychology of the paintings is ambiguous, and the distance and detachment of the aerial viewpoint is critical. Absence and displacement are themes throughout.
Rhodes drew upon various sources, from geography textbooks and environmental surveys to urban planning manuals and her own photographs taken from helicopters and planes. The distance and detachment of the aerial viewpoint is critical: absence and displacement are themes throughout.
Glasgow International 2021 Carol Rhodes, See the World
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum 11 June – 4 July 2021