Barry Schwabsky at Artforum:
GILLIAN CARNEGIE’S current show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the first significant presentation of the English painter’s work in the United States since 2011, comprises just seven works, most of them rehearsing imagery she has used before: a couple of paintings of a tree—maybe the same one in summer, in full leaf, and bare-branched in winter?—a pair of portraits, a still life of flowers, two depictions of the same white cat. Although exquisitely rendered, their mostly pale, mostly grisaille palette puts these images at a ghostly remove from reality.
Carnegie has been painting that tree—or trees like that tree—since 2004, those dried flowers in a cutoff plastic water bottle (or ones like them) since 2000, the white cat since 2017 (succeeding a black one painted many times between 2009 and 2016). One of the two female portrait subjects, who looks like the artist herself, was also painted in a different pose in 2020. But then there is something else: I can’t help but thinking of the old quip that Paul Cézanne painted his wife as if she were an apple.
more here.
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