Artworks - Tania Rutland

Tania Rutland’s paintings engage in the way great painting typically does. Her paintings bring us back and forth from the detail to the whole in a careful and slowly unfolding manner. Most immediately, the paintings suggest a modernist order of contained, repetitive and seemingly self-referential lines and markings. The artist’s source material is well-worn rags. She has spoken about her late mother’s work as a seamstress, the registration of the labourer’s being in the products of physical labour, and the fact of purportedly tedious repetition. These paintings build on her fundamental concern to translate aspects of her personal experience into an original visual language. Broadly influenced by the formalism of Robert Ryman, Prunella Clough’s capacity to distill essences and the rhythm and intimacy of James Hugonin, the autobiographical language of Louise Bourgeois is also pertinent. Tania graduated from West Surrey College of Art & Design in 1989 and went on to complete an MA in Printmaking at The Royal College of Art in 1991. In that same year she won the Sericol Screeprint Award and a year later went on to win the Princes Trust Award.