Gillian Carnegie (born 1971 in

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

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is an England, English

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

. Carnegie is a graduate of the

Camberwell School of Art Camberwell College of Arts is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, a public art and design university in London, England. The college offers further and higher education programmes, including postgraduate and PhD awards. ...

and the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public university, public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City, London, White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design uni ...

. Carnegie works within traditional categories of painting – still life, landscape, the figure and portraiture – with a highly accomplished technique. Yet while apparently following the conventions of representational painting, Carnegie challenges its established languages and unsettles its assumptions. Her work builds up the oil paint to create an almost sculptural relief of

impasto Impasto is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly, usually thick enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas. When dry, impasto provides tex ...

. This technique is most effective in her ''Black Square'' paintings where the dense layerings of black oils coalesce to form dense woodlands. Nominated to the 2005

Turner Prize The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible (this restriction was removed for the 2017 award). ...

shortlist at London's

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in En ...

gallery, her apparently traditional use of the

oil An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is composed primarily of hydrocarbons and is hydrophobic (does not mix with water) and lipophilic (mixes with other oils). Oils are usually flammable and surface active. Most oils are unsaturate ...

medium prompted the

Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was foun ...

headline: 'Turner Prize shocker: the favourite is a woman who paints flowers. Whatever next?' – in allusion to the medium-combative nature of the prize. She was beaten to the prize by

Simon Starling Simon Starling (born 1967) is an English Neo-conceptual art, conceptual artist and won the Turner Prize in 2005. Early life Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, Surrey. He studied photography and art at Maidstone College of Art from 1986 to ...

's ''Shedboatshed''. In 2013 Carnegie exhibited at

in 'Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists'. "I never felt the need to feel informed about the experience of seeing a painting in order that I understand it...I'd like to think someone would still want to look at a painting rather than inform themselves about it beforehand" Tate Britain exhibition. Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Carnegie, Gillian 1971 births Living people 20th-century English women artists 21st-century English women artists Alumni of the Royal College of Art Alumni of Camberwell College of Arts British contemporary painters English contemporary artists English women painters