Debbie Urquart

Debbie Urquhart was born in London in 1972. She studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where she graduated in 1995 with a Batchelor of Arts (Hons). Urquhart likes to paint the things around her, and yet her pictures are oddly undomestic. Theres no narrative dimension to her cool interiors with their neutral tones - no sense of a domestic life interrupted or of a presence recently in the room.

Urquharts paintings excite our interest in the way things fit together. Shes a picture-maker on an artistic mission to reveal the elegant, spare geometry beneath the confusion of the everyday. She uses tables in front of a window as an optical device to trick the objects on her table into projecting an abstract geometry of shadows on the surface. Her tilted tabletops are pictures within pictures. Her paintings hold together like the solutions to problems - combining the curve of the table, the arch of the cat's back and the stem of the orchid into one image.

In 1999 she was a finalist for the Windsor & Newton Young Artist Award and won it in 2000 (along with the Stoke-Roberts Bursary Award). In 2001 and 2002 she won the Windsor & Newton Prize.

Solo Exhibitions
1999  20th Century Gallery, London
2000  20th Century Gallery, London
2001  Paisnel Gallery, London
2002  Paisnel Gallery, London
2004  Messum's, London
2006  The Redfern Gallery, London