Caragh Thuring 29 Apr - 23 May 2009 11 Duke Street, St James's

The Directors of Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to announce Caragh Thuring's first exhibition at the gallery and first major solo show in London. The show will feature a selection of new paintings.

Caragh Thuring (b. Brussels 1972) paints on un-primed linen canvas, treating the surface as if drawing on a sheet of paper. Heavy industry, architecture, shipping cranes and hoists often dominate the canvas. Thuring extracts minutiae from these large structures, grafting in elements of incongruous scale and finely rendered detail to create her complex and sometimes contradictory compositions. The resulting vignettes don't adhere to traditional hierarchies in painting - awkward in appearance, they seem to slip between abstraction and figuration. However, Thuring is clear that her paintings are not abstract; they contain layered images from multiple, discreet sources and often suggest a human presence. The artist says, 'The paintings are built and collated, as if making or installing sculpture, directing the onlooker to exercise their imagination within a collection of parts'.

In one vast painting, Thuring loosely replicates Corbusier's ground plan for The Cabanon which he built for his wife on the Côte d'Azur in 1952. Thuring used the photocopied plan from the local tourist office along with her own photographs as source material. The artist was inspired by the contrast between the spare economy of Corbusier's design and the organic, slightly garish murals with which he decorated the interior. By scaling up the plan to fit the canvas, and superimposing her version of one of the murals, Thuring creates a clashing map of space and imagery.

A photograph of rooftops at dusk taken in Veurne, an old market town in Belgium, is the basis for another work in the exhibition. The silhouette of the skyline crowds the bottom of the painting, above which hover white blocks. The picture plane is dissected with ropes, casting mismatched shadows and distorting space in such a way as to create a sense of anachronism, of things out of place and out of time.

These ideas are pushed further in Thuring's appropriations of Pieter de Hooch's 'The Courtyard of a House in Delft' (1658). Interested in the notion of remaking the same painting, Thuring has made two works which investigate the way de Hooch juxtaposes technical confidence and impossible spatial compositions. This area of illusion is also where Thuring's interest lies.

Through this strategy of distorting and appropriating the past, from the Dutch golden age through to high modernism, Caragh Thuring negotiates what it means to make a contemporary painting.