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“Carole Gibbons became an artist when nearly all Scottish painters either supported themselves by teaching or emigrated. The only exceptions were those who inherited money or resigned themselves to poverty and neglect. Of the latter group some died early. Thank goodness Carole and her talent have survived. Her spiritual colleagues are painters as different as Munch, Bonnard and Braque. For like them she shows people and things coloured as much by her emotions as by the light of places where she works. Her still lives, mostly painted in Glasgow, are strong but melancholy interior harmonies where rich colours – some surprisingly sweet – glow among sombre ones.” – Alasdair Gray, author of Poor Things, 2003.
White Columns is proud to present the first exhibition in the United States by Glasgow-based artist Carole Gibbons (b. Glasgow, 1935.)
Despite achieving a degree of local success earlier in her career, Gibbons’ practice has been largely obscured over the past half-century. The renewed interest in her work, initially from a generation of younger artists with roots in Glasgow including the painters Lucy Stein and Andrew Cranston, has resulted in a reappraisal of Gibbons’ practice that led to the publication in 2023 of her first monograph; a widely reviewed 2023 solo exhibition at Glasgow’s Céline gallery; and the inclusion of her work in Tate Britain’s current and ground-breaking feminist exhibition in London: “Women In Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.” Gibbons was a student at The Glasgow School of Art in the late 1950s. After her studies, she traveled Europe, living and working in Spain for a period before returning to Glasgow in 1967. Her paintings, produced over the past six decades, provide us with a compelling narrative that mirrors the ensuing shifts in British culture, from the post-war austerity of the 1950s, via the societal shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, to her more recent impact on subsequent generations of artists working with and around figuration. Her exhibition at White Columns, her first in the United States, takes the form of a focused survey of what she has described as her “post-mythological” period from the early 1970s to the present, and will be presented alongside a selection of works on paper and historical materials drawn from the artist’s archives.
At once familiar and utterly distinctive, Gibbons’ work draws freely from both art history and the incidental poetry of everyday life. Her paintings are marked by a unique quality of attention that converges at the point where the universal meets the quotidian. Even in Gibbons’ later works, a feeling of the mythic persists, an interior or psychologically fraught world always threatening to emerge through the shimmering materiality of her forms. In Gibbons’ cosmos, everyday scenes evoke enchanted encounters replete with protean shapes. Objects seem to abide by a mysterious though omnipresent internal logic, what the artist Lucy Stein has described as “instinct becoming form.”
Read the rest of the press release here.
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