Carole Gibbons

March 22–May 4, 2024
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Angled view of a freestanding gallery wall, where a large colorful painting of a woman holding an orange cat hangs in a wooden frame. In the background, four brightly colored paintings are visible on the north main gallery wall, which appear mostly abstract at this distance. All the paintings are framed and hung within a painted white square on the gray gallery walls.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings hang on the left wall, the closest one depicting a colorful still life where green grapes and fruit rest in a pink dish on a table in front of a bright blue object. The other two are muted orange and brown-toned paintings. The wall has a brick archway through which Veronica Ryan’s sculptures can be seen in the background. On the adjacent wall hangs another still life painting.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a gallery wall with three paintings of colorful still lifes. There are two additional paintings on the left, adjacent wall.) 

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings of still lifes are visible that vary in size. The dominant colors of the painting are muted warm oranges and browns.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings with wooden frames are visible. On the left, the smaller of the two paintings  depicts an interior view at night where objects, including an open book, rest upon a small table in front of a window. In the other painting, atop an ornate wooden table there is a vase of pink flowers (which resemble peonies) and a small book open to a portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Both paintings are composed of broad, expressive brush strokes.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. To the left is a square painting of a still life including a glass jar of dried blue flowers and an object that resembles a human face resting on a table. The shadows and light are composed of distinctive brushstrokes of warm pinks, oranges, and browns. To the right is another painting of a still life consisting of two brown objects in the foreground with blue and green geometric shapes filling the background.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. The painting on the left is a still life of a bowl of fruit surrounded with bright pink brush strokes. To the right, the painting consists of bright blue geometric shapes and lines with warm brown accents. Both paintings are framed in wooden frames with a light coat of silver paint.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. On the left wall hangs an abstract, blue painting. On the right wall, two horizontal, rectangular paintings hang. On the left, a bright pink and blue still life where the objects consist primarily of abstract, round shapes. To the right of this hangs a wider painting, where a bright orange background transitions to a deep blue with warm brown shapes in the foreground.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with four, brightly colored, whimsical paintings that border on abstraction are shown. Three of the paintings are still lifes and the rightmost is a landscape.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with two paintings. To the left, the painting shows a bright pink bowl containing orange, pink, and yellow fruit in front of a turquoise background. The painting on the right is a square painting with wandering deep orange lines in a pink and orange atmosphere, with green leaves and purple grapes, framed in a wooden frame with silver paint.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a freestanding gallery wall. A primarily blue and red painting is hung, depicting two glass bottles that sit between objects that verge on abstraction.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (A wide angled view of the main gallery. Colorful still life paintings in wooden frames are seen on the far walls, and one on the freestanding wall. On the left, there are two long tables containing ephemera.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and artist ephemera. The artwork on table from left to right are: an open sketchbook with two figural drawings in blue ink, the left page containing the text “Strawberry Pink,” a small painting of a white cat curled up with a colorful glow, a small gouache painting of a bowl of fruit and the night sky, and a watercolor depicting a sculptural head resting on a table.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and ephemera. The artworks on the table from left to right are: a watercolor painting of a figure with a white animal draped over its shoulder in front of a pink and orange background, a watercolor painting depicting an orange and black cat standing atop a pink ledge with a light wash, purple background, a spiral bound notebook open to a single page showing a pink and blue drawing of a bird.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024.

Carole Gibbons, Self-Portrait With Muse, 1990-94, oil on canvas, 55 7/8 x 55 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A pink and orange toned painting in a wooden frame. Gibbons’ characteristically expressive brush strokes compose a figure holding a cat up to its face with an image of still life next to the cat. The figure is bathed in orange light with green shadows, in front of a bright pink background.)

Carole Gibbons, Self-Portrait With Muse, 1990-94, oil on canvas, 55 7/8 × 55 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes.

Carole Gibbons, Still Life, Apples Against a Night Sky, 1992-96, oil on board in artist’s frame, 39 1/2 × 29 3/4 in., 48 3/4 × 39 1/2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A painting of a gray bowl holding two orange fruits and surrounded by bright pink brush strokes and blocks of abstract color which create the space in which the bowl sits. The painting has a wooden frame that is painted light gray with delicate pink spirals.)

Carole Gibbons, Still Life, Apples Against a Night Sky, 1992-96, oil on board in artist’s frame, 39 1/2 × 29 3/4 in., 48 3/4 × 39 1/2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes.

Press Release

“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.”

The boundary-dissolving tendencies of Gibbons’ paintings are echoed in the biographical facts of her life. The subjects of Gibbons’ earlier works explored the mythological and the folkloric – ideas that she would all but abandon in the early 1970s, when she effectively restarted her practice by focusing on the fundamentals of still-life painting and domestic tableaux, tendencies that persist to this day. An early period spent living and working in Spain continues to influence her palette: the walls of her Glasgow home-studio, where she has lived for more than 50 years, are awash in vivid yellows and muted pinks, colors that “frame” her canvases and the many objects that sit in front of the paintings that depict them. In several instances the artist’s hand-made frames are adorned with sketched-out spirals. Rather than appearing decorative, it is as if spectral tendrils of the paintings were trying to reach out into the world, or perhaps to pull the real world into the realm of painting. Lucy Stein succinctly summarizes many of the ongoing themes of Gibbons’ work as: “mothers, water, drowning, the unconscious, psychoanalysis, depression, grief, feminism, domesticity, matrilineal inheritances, the power that death exerts over the living, bliss, love, motherhood, eternal return.”

Writing about Gibbons’ 2023 Céline gallery exhibition in Artforum, Susannah Thompson noted: Carole Gibbons may be the most famous artist you’ve never heard of. Now in her late eighties, the Glasgow-born painter racked up a flurry of successes between the 1960s and the 1980s… And then, nothing. Yet Gibbons persevered, continuing to develop an exceptional body of work. When asked in a 2021 interview how she defined success, she replied, “a good brushstroke.” In the past decade or so, though, largely thanks to those good brushstrokes and the efforts of a younger generation of curators as well as artists… her work is, tentatively, hopefully, once again attracting the attention this exhibition proves she deserves.”

 


 

“We had been talking for 90 minutes, and I needed to get a train to Edinburgh… I stopped recording, said my goodbyes. I am so grateful to Gibbons. It was an honour to spend time in her world, with her art, her ideas, her memories, and her active, encouraging, collaborative, searching mind.” – Charlie Porter writing on Carole Gibbons, 2023.

This exhibition is accompanied by a newly commissioned text on Gibbons by the celebrated British writer Charlie Porter – author of What Artists Wear (2021) and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion (2023) – which will be available from the gallery.

 


 

White Columns would like to thank to Carole Gibbons for her enthusiasm for and commitment to this presentation of her work in New York; Carole’s son Henry Gibbons Guy for his enthusiasm and cooperation throughout; Ben Seeley and Kirstie Sequitin of 5b for their initial introduction to Carole’s work and their subsequent collaboration on this project; Charlie Porter for the wonderful text; everyone at Céline gallery, Glasgow; and to Hales Gallery, London and New York, for their invaluable advice and cooperation.

Copies of Gibbons’ first monograph – published in 2023 by 5b and featuring texts by the artists Andrew Cranston and Lucy Stein – will be available to purchase from the gallery.

For more information about this exhibition, please contact info@whitecolumns.org

For press inquiries, contact violet@whitecolumns.org

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Angled view of a freestanding gallery wall, where a large colorful painting of a woman holding an orange cat hangs in a wooden frame. In the background, four brightly colored paintings are visible on the north main gallery wall, which appear mostly abstract at this distance. All the paintings are framed and hung within a painted white square on the gray gallery walls.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings hang on the left wall, the closest one depicting a colorful still life where green grapes and fruit rest in a pink dish on a table in front of a bright blue object. The other two are muted orange and brown-toned paintings. The wall has a brick archway through which Veronica Ryan’s sculptures can be seen in the background. On the adjacent wall hangs another still life painting.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a gallery wall with three paintings of colorful still lifes. There are two additional paintings on the left, adjacent wall.) 
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings of still lifes are visible that vary in size. The dominant colors of the painting are muted warm oranges and browns.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings with wooden frames are visible. On the left, the smaller of the two paintings  depicts an interior view at night where objects, including an open book, rest upon a small table in front of a window. In the other painting, atop an ornate wooden table there is a vase of pink flowers (which resemble peonies) and a small book open to a portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Both paintings are composed of broad, expressive brush strokes.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. To the left is a square painting of a still life including a glass jar of dried blue flowers and an object that resembles a human face resting on a table. The shadows and light are composed of distinctive brushstrokes of warm pinks, oranges, and browns. To the right is another painting of a still life consisting of two brown objects in the foreground with blue and green geometric shapes filling the background.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. The painting on the left is a still life of a bowl of fruit surrounded with bright pink brush strokes. To the right, the painting consists of bright blue geometric shapes and lines with warm brown accents. Both paintings are framed in wooden frames with a light coat of silver paint.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. On the left wall hangs an abstract, blue painting. On the right wall, two horizontal, rectangular paintings hang. On the left, a bright pink and blue still life where the objects consist primarily of abstract, round shapes. To the right of this hangs a wider painting, where a bright orange background transitions to a deep blue with warm brown shapes in the foreground.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with four, brightly colored, whimsical paintings that border on abstraction are shown. Three of the paintings are still lifes and the rightmost is a landscape.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with two paintings. To the left, the painting shows a bright pink bowl containing orange, pink, and yellow fruit in front of a turquoise background. The painting on the right is a square painting with wandering deep orange lines in a pink and orange atmosphere, with green leaves and purple grapes, framed in a wooden frame with silver paint.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a freestanding gallery wall. A primarily blue and red painting is hung, depicting two glass bottles that sit between objects that verge on abstraction.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (A wide angled view of the main gallery. Colorful still life paintings in wooden frames are seen on the far walls, and one on the freestanding wall. On the left, there are two long tables containing ephemera.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and artist ephemera. The artwork on table from left to right are: an open sketchbook with two figural drawings in blue ink, the left page containing the text “Strawberry Pink,” a small painting of a white cat curled up with a colorful glow, a small gouache painting of a bowl of fruit and the night sky, and a watercolor depicting a sculptural head resting on a table.)
Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and ephemera. The artworks on the table from left to right are: a watercolor painting of a figure with a white animal draped over its shoulder in front of a pink and orange background, a watercolor painting depicting an orange and black cat standing atop a pink ledge with a light wash, purple background, a spiral bound notebook open to a single page showing a pink and blue drawing of a bird.)
Carole Gibbons, Self-Portrait With Muse, 1990-94, oil on canvas, 55 7/8 x 55 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A pink and orange toned painting in a wooden frame. Gibbons’ characteristically expressive brush strokes compose a figure holding a cat up to its face with an image of still life next to the cat. The figure is bathed in orange light with green shadows, in front of a bright pink background.)
Carole Gibbons, Still Life, Apples Against a Night Sky, 1992-96, oil on board in artist’s frame, 39 1/2 × 29 3/4 in., 48 3/4 × 39 1/2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A painting of a gray bowl holding two orange fruits and surrounded by bright pink brush strokes and blocks of abstract color which create the space in which the bowl sits. The painting has a wooden frame that is painted light gray with delicate pink spirals.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Angled view of a freestanding gallery wall, where a large colorful painting of a woman holding an orange cat hangs in a wooden frame. In the background, four brightly colored paintings are visible on the north main gallery wall, which appear mostly abstract at this distance. All the paintings are framed and hung within a painted white square on the gray gallery walls.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings hang on the left wall, the closest one depicting a colorful still life where green grapes and fruit rest in a pink dish on a table in front of a bright blue object. The other two are muted orange and brown-toned paintings. The wall has a brick archway through which Veronica Ryan’s sculptures can be seen in the background. On the adjacent wall hangs another still life painting.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a gallery wall with three paintings of colorful still lifes. There are two additional paintings on the left, adjacent wall.) 

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. Three paintings of still lifes are visible that vary in size. The dominant colors of the painting are muted warm oranges and browns.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings with wooden frames are visible. On the left, the smaller of the two paintings  depicts an interior view at night where objects, including an open book, rest upon a small table in front of a window. In the other painting, atop an ornate wooden table there is a vase of pink flowers (which resemble peonies) and a small book open to a portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Both paintings are composed of broad, expressive brush strokes.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. To the left is a square painting of a still life including a glass jar of dried blue flowers and an object that resembles a human face resting on a table. The shadows and light are composed of distinctive brushstrokes of warm pinks, oranges, and browns. To the right is another painting of a still life consisting of two brown objects in the foreground with blue and green geometric shapes filling the background.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall. Two paintings are visible. The painting on the left is a still life of a bowl of fruit surrounded with bright pink brush strokes. To the right, the painting consists of bright blue geometric shapes and lines with warm brown accents. Both paintings are framed in wooden frames with a light coat of silver paint.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An angled view of adjacent gallery walls. On the left wall hangs an abstract, blue painting. On the right wall, two horizontal, rectangular paintings hang. On the left, a bright pink and blue still life where the objects consist primarily of abstract, round shapes. To the right of this hangs a wider painting, where a bright orange background transitions to a deep blue with warm brown shapes in the foreground.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with four, brightly colored, whimsical paintings that border on abstraction are shown. Three of the paintings are still lifes and the rightmost is a landscape.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of gallery wall with two paintings. To the left, the painting shows a bright pink bowl containing orange, pink, and yellow fruit in front of a turquoise background. The painting on the right is a square painting with wandering deep orange lines in a pink and orange atmosphere, with green leaves and purple grapes, framed in a wooden frame with silver paint.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (Front view of a freestanding gallery wall. A primarily blue and red painting is hung, depicting two glass bottles that sit between objects that verge on abstraction.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (A wide angled view of the main gallery. Colorful still life paintings in wooden frames are seen on the far walls, and one on the freestanding wall. On the left, there are two long tables containing ephemera.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and artist ephemera. The artworks on table from left to right are: an open sketchbook with two figural drawings in blue ink, the left page containing the text “Strawberry Pink,” a small painting of a white cat curled up with a colorful glow, a small gouache painting of a bowl of fruit and the night sky, and a watercolor depicting a sculptural head resting on a table.)

Carole Gibbons, installation view, 2024. (An overhead view of a table containing works on paper and ephemera. The artworks on the table from left to right are: a watercolor painting of a figure with a white animal draped over its shoulder in front of a pink and orange background, a watercolor painting depicting an orange and black cat standing atop a pink ledge with a light wash, purple background, a spiral bound notebook open to a single page showing a pink and blue drawing of a bird.)

Carole Gibbons, Self-Portrait With Muse, 1990-94, oil on canvas, 55 7/8 × 55 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A pink and orange toned painting in a wooden frame. Gibbons’ characteristically expressive brush strokes compose a figure holding a cat up to its face with an image of still life next to the cat. The figure is bathed in orange light with green shadows, in front of a bright pink background.)

Carole Gibbons, Still Life, Apples Against a Night Sky, 1992-96, oil on board in artist’s frame, 39 1/2 × 29 3/4 in., 48 3/4 × 39 1/2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Matthew Barnes. (A painting of a gray bowl holding two orange fruits and surrounded by bright pink brush strokes and blocks of abstract color which create the space in which the bowl sits. The painting has a wooden frame that is painted light gray with delicate pink spirals.)