Girl

Executed in 2004, the year that Phoebe Unwin graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, Girl is an exquisite early example of her ethereal painterly practice. Building her images entirely from memory, the artist relishes the fluid, malleable properties of the medium, merging figurative and abstract techniques in a bid to transform everyday events into dreamlike realities. Speaking of the present work, Unwin explains, ‘This painting explores a certain tension and mood manifest through a girl in profile: the uncomfortable leaning on one arm, the sculpture-like rigidity and the palette of blues, whites and purples. The subject has what might be thought of as particularly girlish attributes, but in this painting I wanted the “girlishness” to become rigid and tense: the high-up ponytail looks almost solid and a strange “thing” rather than something soft and fluffy. Her knitted jumper appears to be a structure both containing her body and stiffly holding it together. She is nobody in particular: more a combination of things seen and felt. I chose to make her in a limited palette as I wanted the painting to focus on what she might be feeling, with the aim of creating a pensive atmosphere. She is not confrontational and I don’t think of her as any kind of “character”. I don’t think she is a whole being herself, rather a kind of sculpture of feeling.’ Unwin’s inclusion in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2010 exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now propelled her into the public eye; her works are currently held in museum collections including Tate, London, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

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