Mysterious goings-on at the edge of town. A bright green insect with diaphanous wings and angry red eyes stands, with four sucker-like hands on hips, against the backdrop of a livid sunset. Silhouetted against the sky is a giant factory, all pipes and chimneys, a sinister proliferation of equipment. The angry green insect is wearing calf-high skinny black boots and a see-through pink bra with matching knickers. She has drawn herself up to her full height. There is more: three gleaming white bones, sucked clean of flesh, on the ash-grey ground at her feet. The plot thickens.
Uncovered was painted in 1995 but looks anything but dated. Bright, sharp, morbidly fascinating, it still has a sting in its tail for the here and now. The dystopian future inhabited by the hysterical mutant insect seems closer than ever. The picture is a characteristically teasing mise-en-scene by the painter Liz Arnold, who was one of the outstanding artists of her generation. She died in 2001, at the age of 36, after a shockingly brief sruggle with ovarian cancer. Many people had been seduced by her paintings, whether at the “New Contemporaries” show of 1996, or “Beck’s Futures” of 2000, or at her several one-woman exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Europe and America. But because she was too young to have had a retrospective, none of her admirers ever saw the full span of her work, in one place and at one time. An enthralling new show at the Camden Arts Centre does much to fill that gap. Its four curators, all of them artists who knew Arnold personally, have assembled pictures from almost all phases of her career. The exhibition is a labour of love, carefully selected and beautifully displayed.
Arnold’s paintings of the mid-1990s are thronged with an idiosyncratic menagerie of insects, cats...
