Wednesday 11 December 2013

Justine Kurland - Spirit West


Surprisingly (for such a recent book) very scarce. Rather surreal and almost Fauconesque (well maybe not) landscapes populated by teenage girls. Kurland came to prominence in the show 'Another Girl, Another Planet ' with tableau landscapes of the wastelands at the edges of suburbs, populated by unsupervised children and teenagers. All of the work here was developed with a similar idea in mind, albeit on a much larger scale. "I'm always thinking about painting: nineteenth-century English picturesque landscapes and the utopian ideal, genre paintings, and also Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. I started going to museums at an early age, but my imagery is equally influenced by illustrations from the fairy tales I read as a child." A superb work of what Kurland calls the "Degraded Sublime". Pretty magic.