Elizabeth Magill
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present
Northern Sky, an exhibition of new painting by Elizabeth Magill.
“The drama is these paintings is released and withheld. Sometimes there is wind; sometimes there is stillness. What is plain sits uneasily beside what is visionary. There is no easy meaning; instead there is much ambiguity and strange, coiled beauty. Something might be about to happen, but that possibility is contained. It is as though the landscape is holding its breath and releasing its breath”
- Colm Tóibín, from a newly commissioned text for Northern Sky, 2026
Elizabeth Magill is one of Kerlin Gallery’s longest-standing artist collaborations, established when the gallery first opened in 1988. Since then, she has enjoyed a wonderful international career exhibiting in multiple public and commercial galleries across UK, Europe and Asia. She returns to Kerlin Gallery with a new body of paintings Northern Sky represents a new more painterly, experimental expression of Magill’s work. The artist has refined her paintings to a smaller scale, balancing looser, more gestural marks with descriptive landscapes. These works explore the tension between abstraction and observation, creating atmospheric landscapes that feel both familiar and dreamlike. She was inspired by musician Nick Drake when creating this body of work and has named each painting after his song titles.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major new monograph Northern Sky with an illuminating text from celebrated Irish writer Colm Tóibín. Published by Kerling Gallery, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, and Annely Juda Fine Art, London, this full colour hardcover text will span Magill’s career over 240 pages.
Elizabeth Magill’s highly idiosyncratic paintings present subjective and psychological takes on the landscape genre. Rich with kaleidoscopic patterning and fragmented forms, these vistas are embedded in place – usually rural settings on the edges of settlements – but transported through the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs or moods to be presented as something other: landscapes not based on direct observation, but imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection.
Elizabeth Magill
I've never felt magic, crazy as this, 2026
oil on canvas
30 x 40 cm / 11.8 x 15.7 in
about the artist
Elizabeth Magill
b.1959, Canada
Described by critic Isobel Haribson as “epic, enigmatic and evocative”, Elizabeth Magill’s highly idiosyncratic paintings present subjective and psychological takes on the landscape genre. Rich with kaleidoscopic patterning and fragmented forms, these vistas are embedded in place – usually rural settings on the edges of settlements – but transported through the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs or moods to be presented as something other: lush, visionary recollections of hills, lakes, hedges and skies glowing with ambient light. The term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s practice: landscapes not based on direct observation, but imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection. Though they have a cinematic beauty, her paintings can also be eerie or unsettling: trees or telephone wires conceal the view; birds are silhouetted in the dark; rare human figures feel distant, phantasmal; colours feel subdued, or occasionally toxic. Magill’s complex and densely layered paintings are produced using various techniques, at times incorporating stencilling, screenprinting and collage, as well as the pouring, blending, dripping, splashing and scraping away of paint. Film and photography are also central to her research, shaping the way the artist looks at landscape, and infusing her approach to light, tone and atmosphere.
Red Stars and Variations, 2021
Kerlin Gallery
Elizabeth Magill has had solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; PEER, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Milton Keynes Gallery; BALTIC, Gateshead; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Southampton City Art Gallery; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art; and Ulster Museum, Belfast. Magill’s work can be found in the collections of the Tate, London; the British Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Ulster Museum; the Crawford, Cork; the Government Art Collection, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.