Gillian Theobald’s artistic practice melds fictive landscapes with materials found in life, transgressing the boundaries between imagination and reality. These works, joint in their abstract language, employ distinct methods of creation.
Theobald works in relief collages and paintings, whose respective practices form a cohesive, poignant body of work. Though they draw upon an imagination of natural features, Theobald’s verdant spaces have never existed before. Of her recent work, she says, “These paintings are not an abstraction of an actual landscape, but the generation of one that did not previously exist.”
Theobald’s trained hand exacts what has been referred to as “reductive expressionism:” A pared-down iteration of the twentieth-century movement’s brazen application of color and gesture. This historical grounding functioned to support the emergence of Theobald’s imaginary places.
