Artist: Elizabeth Magill

Kerlin Gallery presents Northern Sky, an exhibition of new paintings 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 simple 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 in the publication 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 Kerlin Gallery, Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC, 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.