Miranda Boulton: Ghosts and Flowers
Gallery 67, York Street, London, 28 October – 2 November 2024
“When thinking about still life, a set of characteristics immediately come to mind. Domestic backdrops, a focus on the present moment, and – perhaps above all – an emphasis on the beauty of everyday objects: the sensuous feel and sheen of flowers and fruit. A certain tenderness and inwardness, a preference for melancholic pronouncements on the ephemerality of life. Miranda Boulton’s still life, however, at once radically depart from these norms and remain productively tethered to the genre’s rich history. They are wayward and wild, suffused with an energy that feels impervious to death, and dense with art historical citations.
“The subversive intent of Boulton’s work is best understood with an eye to the genre’s thwarted critical reception. In Joshua Reynolds’ influential Discourses, composed of lectures delivered at the Royal Academy in the late 18th century, still life was relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of genres, which reflected the view of its superficiality and slightness since its origins in 17th century Northern Europe. Partly its inferior status was because of the genre’s association with feminine space – the kitchen, dining room and larder – as well as with women artists who, denied formal training or access to life models, could only paint what they spent their days surrounded by. This project is explicitly feminist in recovering and re-imagining a genre once mired in misogynistic assumptions, but Boulton handles these political ideas in an unexpected way.
“These paintings are meditations on the history of art, but they are also alive to more urgent, emotional questions surrounding existence itself. Part of the joy of seeing a fragment of Mary Moser resurrected in a contemporary context is the glimpse it offers into Boulton’s communing with the artist. Boulton extracts a rose from Moser’s canvas and through an idiosyncratic method shaped by memory and dream it resurfaces as some splash of vermilion in the rich, sprawling ground of one of her canvases. Look closer, and it’s possible to see these women’s eyes meet and their fingers brush.”
Excerpt from Acts of Cross Pollination: Miranda Boulton’s Still Life by Dr Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. She was formerly the Curator of 19th and 20th Century Paintings and Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
About Miranda Boulton b. 1973, Cambridge, UK
Miranda Boulton is a contemporary British painter who lives and works in London. She studied Art History at Sheffield Hallam University and at Turps Banana Art School in London. Her work has been shown internationally at Art Miami (Miami Basel Week) and Expo Chicago with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, in group shows including Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2016 & 2019), ING Discerning Eye (2021), Young Masters Autumn Exhibition & Invitational at the Exhibitionist Hotel (2022-24), and ‘Staged by Nature’, Glyndebourne (2023). In 2021 she won the Jacksons Painting Prize. “Ghost and Flowers” marks Boulton’s first London Solo exhibition.
