Exhibition Review: Caroline Gorick, After Hours, At Bridewell Gallery and Studios
Heat Outside, Hush Within…
On a sweltering, airless afternoon in Liverpool, when Prescot Street seemed to shimmer under relentless sunlight, salvation comes in the form of the Bridewell Studios and Gallery—a cool, contemplative refuge tucked away behind thick Victorian walls. Step inside, and the hush is almost monastic. But it’s not silence that fills the space — it’s something charged, something quietly electric. It’s the presence of Caroline Gorick’s latest work.
Her painting doesn’t so much hang as hum. A visceral field of mostly red, magenta, and crimson pulses from the canvas like a heartbeat. At first glance, there’s a fleeting sense of the floral petal – like gestures drifting in a dark, swirling ground but linger, and it shape-shifts. This is no easy metaphor. It’s abstract, yes, but also deeply bodily — suggesting flesh, fire, bloom, or something caught in the act of becoming. A fecundity of potential.
Gorick’s palette is super bold, immediate, and intensely felt. Deep maroons, oxblood, and bruised plums soak the canvas, setting the stage for slashes of red and rose-pink that burn through the gloom. There’s drama here, not melodrama, but something closer to chiaroscuro, the old Baroque play of light and shadow, manifesting emergence and retreat. It’s colour as emotion, light as memory.
The brushwork is confident, physical, unapologetically present. You feel the artist’s hand in every sweep and drag of pigment. It’s alla prima with backbone — direct, expressive, and at times almost tender. Loops and ribbons of paint knot and twist across the surface, refusing to resolve neatly. This is painting that doesn’t ask to be deciphered — it asks to be felt.
What’s striking is a quiet tension at its core. The forms seem suspended mid-motion, as if caught in a slow, private Kafkaesque transition. Yet the composition holds its shape; it breathes, almost meditates. There’s a beautiful push-and-pull between chaos and control, between wildness and design. Gorick’s work isn’t reaching outward in some grand existential gesture—it’s turning inward, charting the terrain of feeling and memory of the body remembered and imagined.
Technically, there’s a deft play between opacity and transparency. Some layers are rich, dense, luscious. Others are veils — thin, ghostly, allowing the underpainting and brush hairs to whisper through. The effect achieved is depth, organic and layered.
But his isn’t work that gives itself away easily. It asks for attention. It rewards stillness. In the context of the Bridewell — an old police station now reborn as a haven for artists — the contrast is telling. Gorick’s painting holds the space. It invites you to stay a while, to look, to feel, to absorb.
In the end, what Gorick offers is not narrative, but sensation. No clear message, but atmosphere. And in that, lies her power. Caroline Gorick reminds us that painting, at its best, doesn’t have to explain — it only has to evoke. And here, like an alchemist, she manifests something raw, unguarded, and ultimately profoundly alive.
After Hours by Caroline Gorick
A Solo Exhibition of New Paintings
Liverpool Bridewell Gallery & Studios
Exhibition runs until 18 June open 1200 – 1700 daily.
