Watching the City: Morag Caister
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RHODES is excited to present Watching the City, a new series of original works by award-winning portrait painter Morag Caister.
Bringing together a group of sitters from across the creative world, the exhibition considers the experience of looking at other lives, and the distance that exists between one person and another.
For Caister, portrait painting is a way of making the world stand still, if only for a moment. Working from in-person sittings at her Brighton studio, she observes each sitter closely, considering not only their appearance but the space between them. The resulting paintings become an encounter between two perspectives: the sitter looking back at the artist, and the artist attempting to understand a person whose inner world can never be fully known.
This sense of distance is central to Watching the City. Caister approaches the city as an observer, looking towards the lives unfolding around her with affection, curiosity and a sense of longing. There is a particular intimacy in watching lives that are not your own, imagining what lies behind the windows, faces and gestures encountered every day. At the same time, the act of looking invites comparison: the persistent question of how other people live, and whether their experience might somehow be different from our own.The portraits hold this tension between separation and connection. Each sitter exists as an individual, distinct from everyone around them, yet their experiences remain recognisable. Caister’s pared-back compositions give little space for distraction, directing attention towards the person and the act of looking itself. Through subtle shifts in pose, clothing and colour, she considers what can be understood through observation, and what remains inaccessible.
The sitters are drawn from across the creative community, including artists, designers, gallerists and others working within the arts. While each is encountered as an individual, Caister’s approach resists the conventions of the formal portrait. Stripped of context, the figures become less about who they are publicly and more about the experience of being seen.
Watching the City reflects on the strange proximity of life in a city: the feeling of being surrounded by people while remaining entirely separate from them. To look at another person is to glimpse another world, but never to enter it completely. In Caister’s portraits, that distance becomes the space in which the encounter takes place. -
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Selected works
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Collecting
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