calendario eventi  :: 

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8/1/2008

Two exhibitions

Royal Hibernian Academy RHA, Dublin

Ciarán Lennon

One of the distinguishing factors in the RHA's innovative exhibition programme is our commitment to presenting established Irish artists in major exhibitions of an international standard. Painters such as Barrie Cooke HRHA, John Noel Smith HRHA, Richard Gorman RHA and Stephen McKenna PRHA have all had very successful, large solo shows over recent years, with accompanying catalogues, and have been re-introduced to their existing audiences and in many cases introduced for the first time to a new younger audience.

Ciarán Lennon continues this proud tradition with a solo show in the newly refurbished Gallery I. Lennon has been a mainstay on the Irish painting scene for over 30 years with solo exhibitions in IMMA, the Chester Beatty Library and the Douglas Hyde as well as exhibiting internationally. His work has also been included in exhibitions representing contemporary Irish art at home and internationally including; Sense of Ireland, 1980, London; L'Imaginaire Irlandais, Paris; the Pursuit of Painting, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Irish drawing, Drawing Centre, New York.

Lennon's painting is a particular hybrid of American Minimalism with its insistence on the materiality of the painted object and European Arte Povera which licensed the associative quality of materials. Lennon's recent work on which this exhibition concentrates comprises of painted objects that arise from an interaction between artist, natural law and material qualities. There is a playfulness here, a jolie, so often the mark of the artist at the peak of his game. Lennon will conceive a special installation of his work to respond to the new space of the Gallery unencumbered with the staircase which previously invaded the space.

Ciarán Lennon's work can be found in major public and private collections including that of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, who recently selected Lennon's work from their permanent collection for installation in their re-designed rooms alongside works by Philip Guston and Ellsworth Kelly. He has also had solo exhibitions in Irish galleries such as the Fenton, Cork; the Green on Red & Kerlin Galleries, Dublin as well as exhibiting in Gallerie Wienberger,Copenhagen, Gallerie Lahumier, Paris and at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art , Copenhagen.

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Eileen Neff

The Royal Hibernian Academy is proud to present the exhibition Between Us by the American artist Eileen Neff. After a successful run in the Institute of Art (ICA) Philadelphia in late 2007 this exhibition, co-curated by Patrick T Murphy of the RHA & Ingrid Schaffner of the ICA, includes photographs focusing on work from the past ten years. The exhibition traces a fascinating and critical shift from the camera to the computer.

“Using the camera, the computer, and the space of the studio, Eileen Neff poetically reconstructs moments experienced outside of it.” With humour, scale and shape playing important roles in Neff's work, “clouds move from outdoors to in. Windows appear as apertures onto completely unexpected places. The landscape doubles but does not mirror itself. A blur of motion is bifurcated by one strangely still tree. These arresting images show how unfamiliar the world can be. To cut these moments out of the flow of events and images that daily surround us, Neff uses the camera like scissors.” ICA, Philadelphia 2007.

In works such as A Planet's Encouragement, 2007, Neff shows a serene landscape at sunset. With its painterly skyline and large trees bathed in a golden light, this absorbing image conveys a certain nostalgia and romanticism yet contrasting this, darker more ominous areas summon the foreground. Neff has been particularly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau and Wallace Stephens who uses descriptions of landscape in his poetry to reflect various states of mind. Paula Marincola, Director of the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative adds, “An earlier sense of uncomplicated beauty gives way to the uncanny and mysterious. We are held here within the landscape of the imagination, a photographic fiction as self contained and supreme as any poem.”

In Over the Hill, 2007 Neff digitally combines several roads and byways from various points intercepting them at the rise of a hill. Her imagery creates a disorientation and unpredictability reminiscent of getting lost at a fork while also provoking the pleasure one gets in choosing which road to take. In another digitally re-mastered image Anecdote of a Tree, '99-'00, Neff interrupts the fast paced movement of the background landscape by abruptly placing a static tree trunk as if stunning the moving image. With this she creates, “The story is an impossible visible fiction superposed on a photographic illusion”. Arthur Danto, US art critic.
Eileen Neff (b. 1945, Philadelphia, PA) received an MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, a BFA in Painting from Philadelphia College of Art, and a B.A. in English Literature from Temple University. She has exhibited her photographic work nationally and internationally in galleries such as P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, Artist Space, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art among others. She is currently an adjunct professor in the MFA program in Painting at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, a Graduate Seminar instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a Senior Critic in the Graduate Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

This book is accompanied by a full colour hard back catalogue with essays by Patrick T Murphy, Ingrid Schaffner and Jeremy Sigler.

Image: Ciarán Lennon

Royal Hibernian Academy
15 Ely Place - Dublin

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