Caragh Thuring: The Foothills of Pleasure

In Autumn 2022, Hastings Contemporary will present the first major survey show of the work of Caragh Thuring
(b. Brussels, 1972) – her first UK exhibition in six years.

Spanning the last 15 years with more than 20 works, it will include paintings, drawings and monotypes. All works are on loan from the artist and public and private UK collections, in order to avoid the environmental impact of international shipping.

Thuring’s nuanced compositions juxtapose signs and imagery from her recurring iconography of volcanoes, bricks, flora, tartan, human silhouettes, and submarines, to explore where natural and manufactured worlds collide. 

Thuring grew up in Scotland near to the majestic Holy Loch, the site of the renowned Cold War US nuclear submarine base and next to the construction site for the first concrete North Sea oil rigs. This clash of nature and industry has continued throughout her practice: looming submarine silhouettes, vast industrial structures and striking landscapes frequently appearing across different series. Similarly, Thuring incorporates a recurrent brick motif in her work, which for her perfectly represents the natural and the manufactured in a single object.

Volcanoes and submarines lurk beneath, intermittently breaking through to the surface, obliquely referencing Thuring’s curiosity about what lies out of sight. Brick walls obstruct our view and untreated or woven canvas draw our attention to the surface of the painting itself and what might lie beyond. What is not obscured is often fragmented, disrupting the viewer’s familiarity of what they are looking at.

For more recent works, Thuring has collaborated with silk weavers in Suffolk to create bespoke cloth for use as her canvas. The fabric is woven on a loom, sewn together, and stretched onto a wood frame before being painted onto. These fabrics are digital renderings of previous paintings, photographs she has taken or found images. As she describes it: “I want to build the work into the surface, to continue the work I’ve already begun.” Both the labour and the depiction are worked into the surface and the painting becomes a continuation upon this ground.

The paintings also illustrate Thuring’s fascination with boundary lines and liminal spaces, perfectly reflected by the gallery’s own position on the foreshore – surrounded by the town’s historic beach, net huts and working structures of the fishing fleet. Massacre of the Innocents (after Breughel), 2010, almost echoes the towering architecture of local fishermen’s huts on Hastings’ beach, while the language of maritime and landscape permeate throughout.

Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the United Kingdom since 1973, moving first to Argyll, Scotland and later to West Sussex. Receiving a BA Hons in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 1995, she moved to London the same year and currently divides her time between London and Argyll in Scotland. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Caragh Thuring, Luisa Strina Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil (2019); Builder, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago IL (2019); Caragh Thuring, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy (2019); Selected group exhibitions include: Mixing it Up; Painting Today,Hayward Gallery, London, England (2021); Masterpieces in Miniature: The 2021 Model Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England (2021); Vesuvio Quotidiano Vesuvio Universale, Museo di San Martino, Naples, Italy (2019), Slow Painting, England (2018/2019); Virginia Woolf, An exhibition inspired by her writings, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, England (2018).

Caragh Thuring is included in "Double-M, Double-X" at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland from 17 October 2020 – 16 January 2021. 

Caragh Thuring is included in "JOKER" at Jahn und Jahn, Munich, Germany from 10 October - 9 November 2020.

The Sirenuse Art Project was established in 2015 in Positano. Curated by Silka Rittson-Thomas and commissioned by Antonio and Carla Sersale, the project annually invites an artist to Le Sirenuse to permanently present a site-specific and iconic work from the heart of their practice while considering elements of this historic hotel. 

For the 2020 edition, Caragh Thuring has created a painting and a series of gessoed panels inspired by the nearby Vesuvius as well as the hotel’s extensive collection of volcano paintings, gouaches and etchings.Volcanoes are a sustained feature in Thuring's work, a cross-section of an erupting volcano being the first painting she made at the start of her studio practice. Thuring has since painted numerous views of volcanoes, thoughtfully exploring their symbolic, mythical and natural power.

Caragh Thuring is included in the group exhibition "This Corrosion" at Helmet Row Modern Art, London from 6 March to 9 May 2020.

Caragh Thuring is included in the exhibition "Slow Painting" at The Levinsky Gallery at the University of Plymouth, UK from 24 January to 28 March 2020. 

"Slow Painting" is an exhibition of paintings that take their time, and invite us to do the same. Curated by writer and critic Martin Herbert, the exhibition features 19 artists, primarily British or UK based, whose work spans a myriad of styles and applications, from figuration to abstraction. 

Galeria Luisa Strina is pleased to announce that an exhibition of Caragh Thuring's work will be on view from 20 November 2019 - 24 January 2020. 

In her first solo exhibition in Brazil, the London-based artist brings together works that synthesize all her recent lexicon of recycled images: volcanoes, ships, tartan, brickwork, appropriated silhouettes of fashion ads, and even a photographed fragment of a painting by Frans Hals. 

Corbett vs Dempsey is pleased to announce Builder, an exhibition of Caragh Thuring's work. The exhibition will be on from 6 September - 12 October 2019 with an opening reception on Friday, 6 September from 6-8 pm. 

Caragh Thuring will be included in the exhibition "Vesuvio quotidiano, Vesuvio universale" at the Certosa di San Martino - Campania Museum Polo, Naples, Italy from 5 July - 29 September 2019. Focusing on depictions of Mount Vesuvius throughout art history, the exhibtion will present around 100 works from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Caragh Thuring will be included in the new exhibition, "Painter's Beach Club: Telescope", at the Jerwood Gallery from 19 January - 24 March. As curator Nigel Cooke says, "The title of the exhibition Painter’s Beach Club started the thought process - historically, there's been places for painters to gather together - the Colony Room in London where Francis Bacon and Freud used to go, the Cedar Tavern in New York where the Abstract Expressionists used to hang out. So sort of mythically there's always been these places for painters and I thought that maybe social media was like a new version of that."

Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, Italy is pleased to present the solo exhibition Caragh Thuring: Roger, on view from 19 January through 2 March 2019. Utilising various fabrics as canvas, including sailcloth, Neapolitan tartan and woven images of her own previous works, Thuring constructs fragments of submarines, coins, plants, figures, textiles and volcanoes into compositions that explore the spatial depth and vocabulary of painting. The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist's book focused purely on Thuring's depictions of volcanoes created over the last fifteen years.

In these new works Thuring has returned frequently to the motif of tartan, both as a woven fabric and as depicted in paint. The tartan geometry acts as a two-dimensional plane and referential grid on which the syntactical elements of the painting are arranged and through which they are all connected.Thuring has continued this exploration by stretching as her canvas, a registered Neapolitan tartan produced by local draper ISAIA, a fabric producer established in the 1920s and still in operation today as a renowned tailor and menswear label. The long tradition of tailoring and cloth making in Italy and Naples here linked directly with that of Scotland where Thuring grew up, close to another industrial port city: Glasgow, much alike in its energy and vibrancy to Naples.

Caragh Thuring is included in Shadowed Forms at Andersen's Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

The group show is curated by Irish sculptor Kevin Francis Gray, bringing together works from 15 internationally-acclaimed artists. Stretching between their different practices, origins and perspectives, each of the artists thoughtfully presents a selection of works which contribute to an interactive and diversified conversation on the relevance of the figure for today’s viewer, while paying homage the Hepworth piece. 

Private View: 16 November, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: 17 November, 2016 – 21 January, 2017

For her forth-coming show at Thomas Dane Gallery, Caragh Thuring (b.1972, Brussels) has collaborated with weavers from Suffolk and Belgium to create canvas woven with the images of her previous works. Many of the paintings in the exhibition utilize this fabric as their starting point, and over which she has continued to paint to create new works. This ground-breaking approach confusing handcraft and a mechanised industrial process brings to light Thuring’s sustained interest in seriality and self-repetition. Thuring traditionally builds her compositions from fragments. This new group of works is made up of looming submarines, oil-rigs and deep cold blue-blacks. Thuring arranges elements within the paintings, fragmented and abstracted, each supporting the next in a sequential framework.

Private View: Saturday 16 July, 4-8pm
Exhibition Dates: 17 July - 24 July, 2016
 
Westminster Waste
Ilderton Wharf, London SE15
 
Question Centre is a nomadic platform of short-term exhibitions that draws on generational bonds among artists. It presents fresh works by a contemporary artist alongside a piece by a practitioner from a previous generation, conceived the year the younger one was born. Such piece may be an artwork or any other item or event that offers an insight into the year of birth of the invited artist. This 'obstruction' aims to both contextualise a present day practice within a historical perspective and play with the general obsession of the 'forever young' - omnipresent in the artistic environment - thus raising questions concerning generation and context.
 
On its third edition, Question Centre is thrilled to present a series of twelve new paintings by Caragh Thuring alongside a 1972 Thames Television footage featuring maverick snooker player Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins.
 
The project is developed by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present Caragh Thuring’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. This exhibition evolves the foundational components evident in the artist’s recent exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. Continuing with the series of window paintings, originally derived from her own photographs of Dutch suburban homes, Thuring perceives the windows as self-portraits of their owners. Considering the dual function of the windows as devices for observing and for being observed, the objects in these works become substitutes for traditional portraiture. The images are interrupted by reflection, surface and a constant reversal of interior and exterior space, disrupting straightforward readings of psychological perspective, as marked by the boundary of the window frame. Developing this series further, a recurring brick motif appears as a photogram, detached from the painting process, and adding a structured layer to the linen.

10 May - 21 June 2015

Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Caragh Thuring.

27 November 2014 - 1 February 2015
Preview: Wednesday 26 November 2014, 6.30-8.30pm