Claire Kerr (born 1968, Wallsend, UK) lives and works in Dublin. She studied at Magdalen College Oxford, Wimbledon School of Art, London and Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin.
Her paintings, apparently seamless and resolved, in fact feel their tentative way - looking for that enigmatic space where an idea interacts with the tangible and real. Modest in scale, they invite intimacy with a viewer but leave open the question of meaning and interpretation. They are meditative and still – a pause in the everyday – but at the same time playful and good-humoured. Concerned with the fundamental properties of a painted image – surface, depth, context – they also celebrate the idiosyncratic or peculiar, trains of thought at a tangent, an unobtrusive weirdness. They give the impression of precision and fact but make ample use of the fictional and speculative. Along the way towards the emblematic, abstract, or ideal, they embrace the unattainable and the unresolvable, aware that objects and ideas in the cold light of day are subject to the inconvenient details of their existence and to entropy. They often use as their starting point art-historical sources, both distant and recent, to achieve a kind of resonance, merging a sense of the past with a celebration of the contemporary.
'Regardless of their beauty, wit and intelligence - Claire Kerr's paintings inflict a sort of apocalyptic melancholy. They are, ultimately, an elegy'. (Hisham Matar)
A monograph in two volumes, Claire Kerr, Paintings and Notes, 2006 - 2016, was published by r/e projects in 2017.