Carole Gibbons
No collection, no show of modern Scottish art is complete without a work by Carole Gibbons’.
.Alasdair Gray, 2003
Carole Gibbons is one of the most distinctive and interesting painters to have come out of Glasgow in the latter half of the 20th Century. Her paintings burst with colour, they hint at narratives of both darkness and light. They are rich in symbolism and narrative, drawing on the motifs of art history and her personal stories.
Gibbons was born in Glasgow in 1935 and attended Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1957 and unlike many artists of that time she chose not to train as a teacher but pursue her own practice.
Gibbons’ was the second ever woman artist to be shown at the Third Eye Centre (now the CCA) and the first living woman to have a solo exhibition there in 1975.
Still groundbreaking and innovative in her eighth decade Gibbons work has captured the attention of a new generation of artists, including painter Lucy Stein. In 2012, Stein showed her own work alongside Gibbons’ in two exhibitions one in Glasgow during Glasgow International and one in London at Gimpel Fils, London.
Since then Gibbons work has been included in group shows at Glasgow School of Art, Summerhall, Edinburgh and Traquair House. A monongraph is now in planning stages with art publisher Galerie 5b and future exhibitions are being explored.
“Carole is Glasgow’s dazzlingly brilliant modernist feminist painter and the city should be singing her name from the rooftops.”
