Carol Rhodes: Selected paintings and drawings

About

The significant body of work that she has produced over the past twenty five years assimilates and moves beyond two major critical impasses for modern painting: photography and pure abstraction.
 

Rhodes makes small-scale paintings depicting, from aerial viewpoints, encounters between the natural environment and human intervention, fictional syntheses resulting from a re-mixing of photographic sources. Finding beauty in deserted and apparently alienating places, her paintings allow us to contemplate our own relationship to the world around us. Writer Mark Prince has recently observed,
 

She creates compositions out of features she discovers in found photographic material – magazines, pictures, aerial mapping – which are then adapted into the network of a composition. Her marks claim to be in thrall to the way things are, only to turn out out be referent-less. They make us wonder what they might be trying to convince us of, and then encourage us to double back and realise that perhaps this is what all representational painting does.