Biography

Born Manchester 1981 and educated at Stockport College and the University of the West of England, Bristol 2001 – 2004, where she showed in eight group exhibitions then later in ‘Paint’ at the Islington Arts Centre, London. Currently in her second year of postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools. In 2004 she was shortlisted for ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’. In 2006 she was featured in the television documentary A Bit About Art, and a painting of hers was selected by a panel as being one of six favourite pieces in the Royal Academy Summer Show being show. In 2007 she received the Richard Ford Award and Excellence in Drawing Awards.

 

It is remarkable the metamorphoses or transformations that can occur in a young artist given certain fertile and stimulating conditions of environment. Quite early in her time in the Royal Academy Caroline Gorick put aside her considerable early achievements and over many months of experiment reinvented herself as a painter of tense, mysterious, often crepuscular landscapes, which due to her unusual imagination she has successfully invested with an enigma and drama exceeding her earlier work in portraiture: an artist of truly original abilities.

Maurice Cockrill, Summer 2007

 

For her first exhibition Caroline Gorick (born Manchester 1981) showed a sequence of nocturnes, works in oil on canvas which draw the viewer into a dark world both natural and imagined.  Landscapes of lake, forest and air, caught in the last glow of evening but illuminated also by flashes of indeterminate, blue and green light, Gorick’s mysterious paintings point to an intriguingly wide range of sources of inspiration, from opera and ballet to contemporary European film, science fiction and poetry.  Much of the tension in these enigmatic works derives from the way the artist enjoys mixing traditional with contemporary elements, apparent also on a technical level where an adroit sfumato technique is applied in some areas, while in others the brushwork turns altogether looser and bolder.
 
Contrasting sharply with Gorick’s earlier Lux paintings, a series of haunting, large-scale portrait heads (one of them selected in 2006 as among six most outstanding works in the Royal Academy Summer Show), the nocturnes may also be seen to grow out of them. The Latin titles Gorick so likes suggest on the one hand a taste for spell-inducing incantation and on the other a tangible reality calling for classification.  Gustave Moreau, a painter much admired by Gorick, has spoken of paintings ‘thought out, dreamed over, reflected on, produced from the mind,’ and perhaps these provocative landscapes afford us a glimpse into the dream world introduced with her unfinished heads. As Gorick freely acknowledges, her unsettling vision of landscape may owe something to the subversive art of Gerhard Richter; it is also possible to see here an echo of the miniaturised, sculptural landscapes of Mariele Vendecker, perhaps even an anticipation in spirit of Antony Gormley’s hypnotic Blind Light. 

In their ambivalence as much as in their depth and technical prowess, Gorick’s Nocturnes show a persuasive maturity remarkable in a student still only in her second year of postgraduate studies, so it is not surprising that she is already the recipient of several awards and scholarships, most recently the Richard Ford Awardand the Excellence in Drawing Award.