Carol Rhodes
Beatrice Hilke

Scottish painter Carol Rhodes (1959 - 2018) focuses in her work on landscapes that usually receive little attention: post-industrial areas traversed by industrial plants, airports, freeways or reservoirs that recall the unstoppable flow of material and work. Human activity is omnipresent in her images, but people themselves are nowhere to be found. This oscillation between a diffuse presence and absence, between the supposedly recognizable and the abstract, is characteristic of the artist's painting. Her paintings are based on experiences and impressions in the real world, but are fictitious syntheses composed of different sources. In addition to maps, environmental studies or photographs that she found in books on urban planning, geography or geology, she also included her own images, which she sometimes took herself with her camera from helicopters or airplanes. Rhodes transcended all these different sources in the course of a complex painting process that involved numerous sketches, drawings and revisions. Her scenes appear familiar and at the same time strange, everyday and yet mysterious. 

The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Carol Rhodes, curated by Beatrice Hilke at Haus am Waldsee. It brings together a selection of works from the years 1993-2015 and presents not only paintings but also some of the artist's drawings, which were rarely exhibited during her lifetime.