Caragh Thuring

Dock II, 2009
Oil on linen

Caragh Thuring (b. 1972) is a young British painter living and working in London. She paints on un-primed linen canvas, treating the surface as if drawing on a sheet of paper. Heavy industry, architecture, shipping cranes and hoists often dominate the canvas. Thuring extracts minutiae from these large structures, grafting in elements of incongruous scale and finely rendered detail to create her complex and sometimes contradictory compositions. The resulting vignettes don‘t adhere to traditional hierarchies in painting - awkward in appearance, they seem to slip between abstraction and figuration. However, Thuring is clear that her paintings are not abstract; they contain layered images from multiple, discreet sources. Through this strategy of distorting and appropriating the past, from the Dutch golden age through to high Modernism, Thuring negotiates what it means to make a contemporary painting. The artist says, 'The paintings are built and collated, as if making or installing sculpture, directing the onlooker to exercise their imagination within a collection of parts'.