18 April – 25 May 2013
44a Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3PD
Open Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm
Scottish artist Carol Rhodes is well known for her dream-like aerial landscape paintings of edge-lands and semi-industrial landscapes collaged from real environments into fictional views that teeter on the brink of abstraction. Her show at Mummery + Schnelle’s new gallery space just off Old Street brings together paintings and a selection of the preparatory drawings that she makes for each of them. Working through drawing and collage from multiple sources, Rhodes develops a ‘pictorial story’ underpinned by an interest in what can be revealed by distance. Her work is small in scale, rendered with great precision and restraint on gesso grounds in a distinctive palette of pale, washed-out pinks, muted clay colours, watery greys and lemon yellows. The images feel symbolic and metaphorical; meaning is withheld, giving the work a poetic and metaphysical aura. Some of the paintings are almost like negative images of surveillance footage. Shown alongside the paintings and drawings are three items which are designed to re-orientate the reading of the work: an early 19th century Indian miniature (Rhodes spent her childhood in Bengal and has an affinity with Indian court painting); an aerial photograph from 1926 of the site of Woodhenge in Wiltshire – drawing attention to the artist’s interest in what becomes visible though distance; and a photograph by Luigi Ghirri of an avenue of trees disappearing into the mist. A very nice show.
Image: Carol Rhodes, installation view at Mummery + Schnelle, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Mummery + Schnelle, London.
