Born in the mining town of Sutton in Ashfield, England, in 1975, Lisa Gascoigne grew up in a landscape shaped by industry and in contrast, the surrounding countryside. The economic decline that followed the collapse of the coal industry in the English Midlands, meant she was unable to find direction, which led her into factory work after leaving school.
In 1997, just as the Britart movement was rising, aged 22, she left the factory to pursue art, studying first at Mansfield College of Art before continuing her Fine Art studies at Nottingham Trent University, where she began to specialise in painting. Nevertheless, Gascoigne experienced a sense of incompleteness during her studies in England and the restless search for something else continued.
A hiking trip to the Alps in 2001, together with a visit to an exhibition of Sean Scully’s work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, led her to continue her painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where she studied in Scully’s class.
Since then, Gascoigne has developed a distinctive painterly language of layered networks and organic structures. Her work explores pictorial space, materiality and the nature of perception. Rather than depicting the world, her paintings invite the viewer into the moment before perception settles into recognition—the brief interval before something can be named and perhaps instead, can only be felt.
Lisa Gascoigne lives and works in Munich.