Very Fantastically Arranged

A richly illustrated first monograph of artist Caragh Thuring, whose unique and layered paintings invite a boundless reimagining of her subjects.

Very Fantastically Arranged is a richly illustrated first monograph of artist Caragh Thuring, whose unique and layered paintings invite a boundless reimagining of her subjects.

This dedicated volume is the first to comprehensively document the work of Caragh Thuring, the London-based painter and artist. With over 200 images of Thuring's work, as well as written contributions by Laura Smith and Helen Marten, and a conversation with Ralph Rugoff, Very Fantastically Arranged offers an in-depth look into the themes, obsessions, and slippery subjects the artist investigates in her vibrant, multi-layered, paintings. The collision of natural and manufactured worlds runs throughout her practice, with recurring motifs of volcanoes, submarines, bricks, flora, tartan and human silhouettes. Thuring paints fluidly and intuitively, without preparatory drawings, and arranges imagery in opposition to familiar hierarchies. Her fractured yet deft compositions of people and places create intriguingly disjunctive images that interweave technology, humans, and nature. Thuring’s distillation of these subjects, reveals what lies beneath, destabilising the viewer, and forcing them to reconsider their experience and what they have been conditioned to overlook.

This volume reveals, as Laura Smith writes, Thuring's endeavour “to assemble, repeat and reconstruct details from her environment, biography and history into a new and ever-evolving narrative that is as much ours as it is hers to complete.”

Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels in 1972 and received a BA Hons in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 1995. She has had solo exhibitions in galleries across the globe, from Luisa Strina Gallery in São Paulo to Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples to Simon Preston Gallery in New York City. Her works are in the collections of Tate, England; Arts Council Collection, England; Government Art Collection, England; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA, as well as private UK and international collections.

Laura Smith is an English-born curator and writer, and the Director of Collection and  Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield. Previously, she was a curator at Whitechapel Gallery and Tate St Ives, where she curated solo exhibitions of Eileen Agar, Rebecca Warren, Simone Fattal, Helen Cammock, and others, as well as the acclaimed Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings and Turner Prize 2016.

Helen Marten is an artist and writer based in London. She was awarded the Turner Prize in 2016.

Ralph Rugoff OBE has been the director of the Hayward Gallery in London since 2006. He was the artistic director of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and curated the 2015 Lyon Biennale.