calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/3/2015

Two Exhibitions

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

ROSE WYLIE
Gallery 1

Rose Wylie’s idiosyncratic paintings are big, generous, and free-spirited. There are artists with whom her work has some connections, but none who have her tone and attitude. Rose Wylie’s pictures are bold, often a little chaotic, occasionally unpredictable, and always fiercely independent, even though they are not at all domineering.

Inspiration comes from many and varied sources, most of them popular and vernacular. Wylie borrows images from films, newspapers, magazines, and the television; she internalises them and allows herself to follow loosely associated trains of thought, often in the initial form of drawings on paper. The ensuing paintings are spontaneous but carefully considered; mixing up ideas and feelings from both external and personal worlds, she paints what she sees.

Rose Wylie favours the particular, not the general; although subjects and meaning are important, the act of focused looking is even more so. Every image is rooted in a specific moment of attention, and while her work is contemporary in terms of its fragmentation and cultural references, it is perhaps more traditional in its commitment to the most fundamental aspects of picture-making: drawing, colour, and texture. She is a special artist.

A new publication with a text by Sara Baume will accompany the exhibition. The Douglas Hyde Gallery thanks the artist and Jari-Juhani Lager of Union Gallery, London, for their support of this exhibition.

----

INDIAN MATCHBOX LABELS
Gallery 2

Early Indian matchboxes carried beautifully designed labels showing images of Hindu deities and legendary scenes; over time they took on a multitude of themes, ranging from the mundane (keys, lamps, fruit, farm animals) to the exotic (lotus flowers, glamorous beauties, fighting tigers and elephants) and the comical (a pair of monkeys smoking cigarettes, a baby with a moustache, and a portrait than can be read upside down or right side up).

In the 1970s, the Indian state introduced a scheme to reduce unemployment by allowing small businesses to claim state support; numerous new producers of matches emerged, a large number of them being subsidiaries of better-known companies. As a result, countless new labels were produced, many based on existing classic designs with slight and occasionally very bizarre alterations to the text or imagery.

Nowadays there are obsessive collectors of the ephemeral vernacular images that are the subject of this small exhibition, all of them drawn to the bewildering variety of subjects as well as their humour and charm.

Image: MATCHBOX LABEL, Late 20th Century, India

Opening: Thu Mar 5 6pm

Douglas Hyde Gallery
Trinity College, Nassau Street
Mon - Fri 11am to 6pm
Thu 11am to 7pm
Sat 11am to 4:30pm

stampa

permanent link