CARAGH THURING (B. 1972)

Caragh Thuring views the often-declared ‘death’ of painting as a source of liberty; she employs raw linen as a neutral ground to create something new. Her paintings are what she has called ‘speculative environments’, arraying traces, signs, patterns and fragments in shifting focal arrangements that trigger subtle narrative associations. Profoundly engaged in the history of art, she is a hoarder of loaded images, but does not simply appropriate the work of her forebears. ‘I use it as a vehicle to do something else’, she says. ‘I’m looking to get beyond what already exists, and having the imagery in place enables that freedom’ (C. Thuring quoted in A. Butler, ‘Focus Interview: Caragh Thuring’, Frieze, 19 October 2013).

Suggestions of limbs, swords, bodies and billowing clothing drift across the surface of Thuring’s monumental The Massacre of the Innocents (2010). Limned in spare black line, they unfurl across a vast, raw linen backdrop, interspersed with towers of brick and shards and bars of white, pink, orange and yellow paint. With the most delicate of formal hints, Thuring evokes the muscular drama and grand scale of the Biblical scene beloved of the Old Masters – as perhaps most famously depicted in the spectacular Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens – amid a space that seems to strip painting back to its architectonic foundations. With extended viewing the work's elements disintegrate, come together and unfold anew, slipping in and out of time.