Biography
Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. After the death of her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock in 2011, she wrote the introduction to his memoir Until Further Notice, I am Alive. Her first book The Iceberg was published in 2014 to wide critical acclaim. The Iceberg won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2015. It was shortlisted for The Costa Book Award, 2014 and The Samuel Johnson Prize, 2014 and was a finalist in the US National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2017. In 2016 she was a resident writer at Cove Park. She is a Lecturer in Art at Goldsmiths College and lives in London.
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Links
Marion Coutts: Aiming or Hitting, Tintype Gallery, London, March 10 - April 13 2017
Tintype Gallery
Andrew Solomon, the writer and academic whose books include Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon, writes about The Iceberg alongside Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air in the New York Times. The Iceberg came out in the US in 2016 with Grove Atlantic as a Black Cat paperback. It has a terrific cover by Chip Kidd which you can view here - http://lithub.com/the-iceberg/# - along with an extract from the book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/books/review/the-good-death-when-breath-becomes-air-and-more.html?_r=0
This is an interview I did for John McIntyre’s Good Reading Copy which has a section where he asks writers and artists what they are reading … Well, this is what I was reading.
https://goodreadingcopy.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/what-im-reading-artist-and-writer-marion-coutts/
And from a medical humanities perspective… here’s a review of The Iceberg on the BMJ blog, by Liz Barry from the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department at the University of Warwick
http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2015/01/09/the-reading-room-a-review-of-marion-couttss-the-iceberg/
Twenty Six Things is a slow study in forms of attention. It is a cinematic still-life, a classic tabletop emphasizing the tactility and physicality of the objects displayed: twenty six artefacts, each sized to the hand, drawn from the vast collection of Henry Wellcome. The film was shot on 16mm and commissioned by the Wellcome Collection in 2008.
https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/twenty-six-things
While at Art College in Edinburgh Coutts co-founded the group Dog Faced Hermans. Between 1990-94 they were based in Amsterdam and toured extensively throughout Europe and North America. Here is a link to a short biog, not entirely accurate, with discography, written by Douglas Wolk.
http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=dog_faced_hermans
Archive by invitation of artists who have been commissioned or worked with the Contemporary Art Society in various programmes. The CAS acquires work by contemporary artists and distributes them to museums and public galleries.
http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/artist-members/marion-coutts/
United Agents represents the writing of Marion Coutts and the estate of the late Tom Lubbock. The Donkey's Head, an as yet unpublished book by Tom Lubbock is currently under development. This is a new critical reading of painting from the golden age with close analyses of pictures by Caravaggio, the Gentileschis, Poussin, Zurbaran, Le Nain, La Tour and others.
http://unitedagents.co.uk/marion-coutts
http://unitedagents.co.uk/tom-lubbock
Website of Tom Lubbock, with essays and information on books, journalism and collage and including a selection of images of his collage works for the Independent 1999 – 2004.
http://tomlubbock.com/