Tibor De Nagy
724 Fifth Ave., New York
The New Yorker, January 3, 2005, p.14, Goings on About Town—Galleries
A collection of small (most are about twelve by thirteen inches), scumbly paintings made in 2003 and 2004 in Ireland. One might call them landscapes, except that the land and its monuments are, in every painting, obscured almost completely by mists, rains, and clouds. Thus we have titles like Approaching Weather, Obliterating Hills and Fields, Coastline Sparkling Through Diffuse Light, and Tinted Mist Blowing from the Sea. Shils’s depiction of the scrim that strong weather lays over natural scenery has a handsome, blowsy romanticism, perhaps his true subject.