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14/12/2011

Crosscurrent

Green on red gallery, Dublin

Participating artists: Alice Maher / John Cronin / Mark Joyce / Nigel Rolfe / Bea McMahon / Arno Kramer / Ronan McCrea / John Graham / Tom Hunter / Dennis McNulty / Niamh O’Malley / Caroline McCarthy / Niamh McCann

Green On Red Gallery is proud to present the work of a cross-section of its gallery artists in an exhibition called Crosscurrent opening on December 15 and running until January 21, 2012. All the artists have produced new works for the exhibition.

John Cronin’s AR Unfiltered, oil on aluminium, painting continues a theme established with his Augmented Reality show earlier in the year. Here the paint seems to unleash a powerful force through the contrasts of colour and the turbo-charged nature of the application of the oil paint. These apparently aggressive abstract images are often the result of deceptively gentle mark-making. The contrast with Mark Joyce’s small and harmonious paintings couldn’t be greater. The three boxed colour-saturated ink paintings on paper – a development of the earlier Newtonians series where the colours appear as if through a prism - were all made on a recent residency in Iceland and describe light directly, harmoniously and rhythmically. Niamh O’Malley’s work puts a brake on the viewing process bringing it to a slow motion. Untitled is painted on mirror but seen through the “lens” of a patterned and coloured glass. Furthermore, the thing ostensibly observed is a blind spot. There is a poignant, near melancholic sense of the thing never fully grasped but always active.

Nigel Rolfe’s group of photographic and printed works record a number of walks made by the artist, one of which is to a murder scene. The two drawings in the group graphically abstract the subject leaving the viewer with a formally restrained but tense arrangement. This work can also be understood in the context of the artist’s recent Falling performances in Cork and Gwangju. Tom Hunter, once tutored by Rolfe and recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the arts London, shows one large photographic work from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2011 commission to coincide with the production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hunter has composed compelling tableaux using familiar local Hackney scenarios with contemporary East London players.

There is a certain grim irony in the fact that these pictures were made at the time of this year's riots which were, Hunter notes, a midsummer madness of an altogether bleaker nature.
(Polly Coles)

Bea McMahon’s Ode is a typically layered and fascinating video installation with multiple historical and mathematical references that bring together, for example, St. Augustine’s cosmological beliefs with Irish Renaissance Bardic poetry in a witty consideration of the origins of language and beginning of time. It so happens that Ronan McCrea video work, also displayed on the floor, makes specific references to the decades past in a short black and white video work that is contemplative and self-reflexive.

John Graham’s unique oil stick on pvc and limited edition screenprint show the artist at his graphic best. These energetic works, achieved through different means, reveal, accident and all, the process of their conception and mark-making with elegant results in black on white. Caroline McCarthy’s ‘I was thinking of you when this happened’ pencil and acrylic ink drawings on paper leave no room for error in their meticulous execution, despite the suggestion in the title, in two virtuoso and wry renditions of arrested chaos. Niamh McCann’s two works on paper crosses the grand grammar of modernist abstraction with everyday incident and the local. Arno Kramer’s new drawings result from a recent residency in Ireland and, for the first time, evidence a new interest in strong architectural forms in his drawings. Alice Maher’s new Dryad drawings on paper extend her interest in metamorphosing figures from our mythic and literary past. Her writhing, dancing forest beings are caught in the process of change as if in a struggle with the inevitable flow of their fate and their mercurial condition.

Alice Maher will have a major museum exhibition in Dublin in 2012. Mark Joyce and Niamh McCann will have a solo exhibitions in Green On Red Gallery in 2012. This exhibition will be followed by an exhibition of New Work by Mary Fitzgerald, opening on January 26, 2012.

Opening Reception: Thurs 15 Dec, 6 – 8pm

Image: Tom Hunter: 'And I serve the Fairy Queen, to dew her orbs upon the green' (2011) Print mounted on aluminium, 122 x 152cm

Green on red gallery
26 Lombard Street - Dublin
Opening hours are: Tues – Fri: 10 – 6pm / Sat: 1 – 4pm
Please note that we will close for Christmas holidays from 24 Dec to 03 Jan 2012.
Free admission

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