Carol Rhodes

About

Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Carol Rhodes. This is Rhodes' first solo show since her major museum survey at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2007-8. Her new works continue to depict a semi industrial topography of buildings, roads and canals — ‘edgelands' of human enterprise mixing with nature. At first sight softer and more harmonious than some of her past paintings, the recent pictures nevertheless carry Rhodes' distinctive inventiveness, ambiguity and metaphoric charge. Reflecting yet transforming our contemporary, technologised view of the world, Rhodes' work exploits painting's unique amalgam of depiction and physical ‘objectness' to suggest new realities. More than ever she achieves variety within the format of the aerial view, and discovers surprising new fields of exploration and expression. In a current interview in Art World magazine, she comments that painting, ‘whatever else it is (and it has to be other things too), is always a sort of manifesto about what art is now, and what it might become… imposing intention and function onto the substance of paint is essential. It allows me into the real meaning of the painting, whatever that may be'. This exhibition will also include a small number of the artist's rarely shown drawings — the working ‘cartoons' for her compositions.