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.”