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Thérèse Oulton

Born 1953, Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

Thérèse Oulton studied at St Martin's School of Art in London from 1976-79 and then at the Royal College of Art from 1980-83. She enjoyed immediate success with exhibitions at the commercial galleries Gimpel Fils and Marlborough Fine Art and at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1984.

Her early large, abstract paintings, often referencing the landscape, were characterised by complex, richly-textured surfaces and quickly attracted critical acclaim; in 1987, only four years after leaving the RCA, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Oulton is also an accomplished printmaker, her etchings exploring some of the themes of her paintings on a subtle and more intimate scale.

A solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, London in 2010 marked a change in Oulton’s work, the paintings, though still dealing with landscape, were all small-scale and untitled; the images were described by Germaine Greer in a review of the show, as both familiar and strange and she compared them to the art of Australian Aboriginal women in which “the land is no longer a ‘scape’, dominated by a single controlling perspective, but a way of being, connected inextricably to its own travailed past and profoundly involving the working artist and the beholder”.

Oulton has exhibited regularly in the UK, the USA and Europe and is held in many public collections including Tate Britain, Arts Council of Great Britain; British Council; British Museum; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven.

Midas Vein
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