Maeve Gilmore
Emily LaBarge, Artforum
October 2022
Cats, children, dolls, interiors, still lifes, and contemplative self-portraits were not Maeve Gilmore’s only subjects, though they dominated a captivating display—her first institutional exhibition—at Studio Voltaire. Twenty paintings by the English artist, who was born in 1917 and died in 1983, spanned roughly four decades of her career, from 1943 through 1978. While Gilmore’s wider oeuvre includes abstract and pared-down, spiritually inflected work, here the focus was closer to home. A drab hush sometimes falls over invocations of the “domestic,” so often an undifferentiated shorthand for particular kinds of work or subject matter by women, but such muted reverence would hardly befit Gilmore’s paintings. In her paintings—replete with striking imagery and eccentric characters captured in moments of imaginative flight—interiors are filled with interior life. Her mysterious works, with their costumed characters and half-summoned narratives, hover somewhere between the work of Vanessa Bell and Leonora Carrington. […]