Exhibition Roundup

Dublin

Hang Tough Contemporary

Hang Tough Contemporary presented ‘One hand clapping’, an exhibition of new paintings by Katarzyna Gajewska. This was the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. ‘One hand clapping’ borrows its title from the critically acclaimed 1961 book by Anthony Burgess. He explains the title: “The clasped hands of marriage have been reduced to a single hand. Yet it claps.” It is a metaphor that we are defined by what is around us; how we relate to others and the world. On display from 23 March to 9 April.

hangtoughcontemporary.com

Pallas Projects

Pallas Projects/Studios presented Daniel Tuomey’s ‘Control Centre Charlois’, the first exhibition of the gallery’s Artist-Initiated Projects 2023 programme. Tuomey gathered a body of work which uneasily layers roleplaying games with the alienation of life under bureaucratic biometric capitalism. This layering is staged in Charlois in Rotterdam – an area traditionally occupied by dock workers, immigrants and squatters and is currently the target of a public-private gentrification project. On display from 23 March to 8 April. pallasprojects.org

Photo Museum Ireland

Rachel McClure’s exhibition ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ was on display at the Photo Museum Ireland from 23 March to 15 April. Her work is driven by her curiosity about spirituality and her connection within the natural world. There is a drive in her practice to take the intangible and make it tactile, embedding the ethereal into material. Rachel follows her intuition and allows the medium to help her feel a deeper connection to the world within, and around her.

photomuseumireland.ie

Rua Red

Each year Rua Red holds an annual open call exhibition of fine and applied arts. In the group show and Spring Open Exhibition 2023 In ‘Displacement and Belonging – Home’, the selected artists explored the idea of ‘Home’: What is home? Where is home? Is this my home? Thematics emerge such as migration, dislocation and relocation; from the most personal sense of being connected to a place, and to each other, to the wider context of the prevailing disconnection and uncertainties in society today. On display from 24 February to 22 April. ruared.ie

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

The second exhibition of the Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice took place in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, marking the 40th anniversary of TBG+S and the start of its 2023 Programme. Niamh O’Malley’s ‘Gather’, which represented Ireland at La Biennale di Venezia, was presented in an extended form including new sculptures and moving image. The artworks respond to the architecture of the gallery, its location in a city centre, and its close relationship to artists’ working environment in the studios. On display from 3 March to 30 April.

templebargallery.com

The LAB Gallery

The LAB Gallery presents ‘Molecular Revolutions’, curated by the ARC LAB Curatorial Scholar Shannon Carroll, from 30 March to 27 May. ‘Molecular Revolutions’ is a multi-disciplinary group show presenting work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Mark Clare, Clodagh Emoe, Jennifer Mehigan, Erin Redmond, Rosie O’Reilly and Trevor Woods. Inspired by the French Philosopher and eco-activist Felix Guattari, and his concept of molecular revolutions, this exhibition aims to draw attention to our relationship with the natural world.

dublincityartsoffice.ie

[L-R]: Seiko Hayase, Unnatural Ordinary, Overflowing, installation view; Joseph Heffernan, Puppet installation view; image courtesy of Rua Red.

Belfast

ArtisAnn Gallery

Barbara Allen’s exhibition ‘Mastering the Art of Change’ was presented from 5 to 29 April, highlighting a selection of artworks from her career. Allen is a renowned watercolour artist and is a six-time winner of the Watercolour Prize at the Royal Ulster Academy. She has exhibited extensively including at the White House and at Bergen in Norway. Her work is held in many important collections, including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland, Invest NI and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in London. artisann.org

Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich

In her exhibition, ‘The Land of Gemini’, artist Michelle Harton desires to show how beautiful the earth is through the lens of an imagined dream world named after her star sign. She is inspired by the magical glimpses we get daily, be it a sunset, a rock pool, light reflecting off a body of water, or the energy seen and unseen that emanates from each living thing. Michelle invites the viewer to leave their burdens within the paintings and take relief from the movement and colours and time spent with a piece. Continues until 27 May. culturlann.ie

Platform Arts

‘Both, And’ was a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Natalie Pullen, on display from 5 to 22 April. Pullen is an artist who makes paintings which are almost drawings, and drawings that are almost paintings. She works in the mediums of oil bar, watercolour and oil paint on linen canvases, paper and panel. The abstract surfaces reference landscape and organic forms and are informed by her body’s relationship to the land, during travel and residencies in South America, rural Spain and the West of Ireland.

platformartsbelfast.com

Pollen Studio and Gallery

Indigo Azidahaka is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Belfast, whose practice is informed by queer identity, disabled bodies, and displacement. Within the work they explore society and the human condition, isolating key behaviours and rituals and analysing their cause and effect through absurdity. Azidahaka carefully considers a message, levels of immersion, and the audience’s reaction. ‘The Second Coming of Auntie Lynn’ explores human empathy, the idea of superiority, and being roommates with God. On display from 6 to 12 April. pollenstudiobelfast.com

PS²

‘Salad Curse’, by Belfast-based artist, Ekaterina Solomatina, was a mixed-media art show which invited the audience to a confined place of anxiety and excitement, where cursed creative minds seek escape and relief. Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Irish folklore story about the mad king Sweeney – who was cursed to wander forever as a half bird-half human – Ekaterina creates a purgatorial part physical-part virtual space within the walls of PS2. On display from 23 March to 15 April.

pssquared.org

The MAC

On 7 April, two new exhibitions opened at The MAC. In the Tall Gallery, ‘Louise Wallace: Midnight Feast’ presents a new body of painting which looks at desire, excess and the feminine, with the title suggesting forbidden, or Bacchanalian behaviour. In the Sunken Gallery, ‘Sharon Kelly: Red-toRed’ considers the body – and in particular the fragmented body, the torso and broken gesture – as a generative force, emanating from personal encounters with severe illness and its aftermath, while embracing ideas of liminality and transformation. Both exhibitions continue until 13 August. themaclive.com

Michelle Harton, Embodied Within The Land, painting; image courtesy of Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich.

Regional & International

Serena Caulfield, Where This Place Is 2022, oil on canvas, 100 x70cm; image courtesy of Wexford Arts Centre.

Nigel Rolfe, Blue Pigment Hands, 2010, Giclée Print on 300gsm Fabriano, Edition of 5, 60 x 80 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery.

Crawford Art Gallery

The group exhibition ‘RADHARC: Perspectives in Print’ is presented with bilingual labels (Irish and English) and offers a cross-section of printmaking practice over the past century. Featuring works by artists ranging from Katherine Boucher Beug and Fiona Kelly to Robert Indiana and Pablo Picasso, ‘RADHARC’ surveys topographical perspectives and introspective states. The Irish word radharc suggests a prospect, view, scene, range of vision, or something seen. On display from 4 February to 21 May.

crawfordartgallery.ie

Centre Culturel Irlandais

‘To the Edge of Your World’, is an exhibition of recent work by Anita Groener (7 April to 4 June). Questions of migration, memory, place, and time have catalysed Groener’s practice since 1982, when she left her native Netherlands to establish herself in Ireland. ‘To the Edge of Your World’ asks what it means to be human today. The works in the installation painstakingly transform discarded materials such as twigs, twine, and cardboard into delicate sculptural metaphors for the interconnectedness of individual experience and world events. centreculturelirlandais.com

Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery

‘Flail’ by Debbie Godsell was on display at Cork Printmakers Studio Gallery from 20 February to 6 April. ‘Flail’ was a test ground and fluid project space for new work by Godsell, who explores the meaning of custom and tradition, ethnicity, identity and belief systems through the lens of the Church of Ireland tradition of the harvest thanksgiving. ‘Flail’ examined the symbolic frameworks of this annual tradition, bringing together contemporary and historical iterations and their collective meaning within a modern Ireland. corkprintmakers.ie

Fountain Street Gallery

Fountain Street Gallery in Boston screened Walk the gog and Irish Sky… (2022) by Noel Molloy from 2 to 29 April. In February 2021 Fountain Street launched ‘The Sidewalk Video Gallery’, a public viewing gallery for video and other digital media art. Exhibitions of short, silent, experimental work are being displayed on two 50-inch monitors facing out from gallery windows at sidewalk level. The programming is designed to promote diversity and include a broad array of artists, styles, thematic content, and levels of experience.

fsfaboston.com

Galway Arts Centre

The exhibition ‘Set to go’ by Benjamin de Búrca and Bárbara Wagner takes its title from the duo’s first film work, Faz que vai (2015), which is the name of a Frevo dance step from Pernambuco in Brazil. This dance step feigns a moment of imbalance where the body lurches forward only to stop on its heels, arms spread wide to steady the action, before returning to the first pose. ‘Set to go’ at Galway Arts Centre presented a selection of the artists’ films from 10 March to 22 April.

galwayartscentre.ie

glór

3 March to 29 April, glór showed a selection of work from The National Photography Collection, including a number of Clare-related works. The National Photography Collection was established in 2021 by Photo Museum Ireland. It aims to reflect the development of the medium of modern and contemporary photography in the Irish context. It charts the work of leading Irish artists, critically framing their practice to build awareness of the politics of place and the role of photography in shaping cultural identity.

glor.ie

GOMA Gallery of Modern Art

‘Fruity Bodies’, a new exhibition by artist Joanna Hopkins, ran from 25 February to 9 April. ‘Fruity Bodies’ was a multimedia installation that explored folklore with landscape and the human form, focusing on the female body, native plants, and sites of manmade structures. The work seeks to make abstract, hybrid connections between non-human entities and our human selves, as a way to explore identity, the rural and the urban, empathy for our natural environment, and to better understand the human condition.

gomawaterford.ie

Green on Red Gallery

‘In Essence’, an exhibition of new and recent artworks by Kirstin Arndt, Fergus Martin, and Nigel Rolfe was presented at Art Düsseldorf 2023 – the gallery’s third participation in this new German art fair, founded in 2017. Working across a wide variety of sculptural, photographic, painted and performed media, each artist uses their materials in a stripped down, distilled or purified form to convey something fundamental about existence, usually with the minimum of physical and material means. On display from 29 March to 2 April. greenonredgallery.com

Island Arts Centre

For the exhibition ‘Rip it up and start again’ Anushiya Sundaralingam has taken the sari, a traditional item of Sri Lankan clothing, and reworked metres and metres of cloth to tell a new story of the generations of women who wore this fabric. Collected saris from the Sri Lankan diaspora, many passed down in families, have been ripped and refashioned to create new works. Fabrics, from everyday settings to special occasion wear, are imbued with meaning, sadness, joy, celebration, and nostalgia. On display from 9 March to 6 April.

islandartscentre.com

John Martin Gallery

Martin Finnin’s latest exhibition, ‘The Grammar of Clouds’, brings together paintings from the last two years alongside four sculptures begun in 2021 and recently completed. Over the last 20 years, Finnin has evolved a highly distinctive approach to abstraction in which forms exist in their own space, as if floating in a measurable void. As such they form a very distinct and separate body of work. On display in London from 26 April to 19 May.

jmlondon.com

Scarriff Library Gallery

Clare Arts Office in conjunction with Scarriff Library Gallery presented “Into the Woods”, an exhibition at the Scarriff Library Gallery by Steven Doherty. “Into the Woods” portrayed the power and beauty of trees, a photographic and magical journey into a small native woodland near Flagmount, Co. Clare. Doherty has worked for many years as a photojournalist and picture editor for national UK newspapers and magazines. On display from 21 March to 21 April.

clarearts.ie

Wexford Arts Centre

Wexford Arts Centre presented ‘Not somewhere else but here’, an exhibition of new paintings by artist Serena Caulfield. The exhibition ran in the lower and upper galleries from 14 February to 25 March. Caulfield was selected to take part in the MAKE/Curate programme and work with curators Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll and Cliodhna Shaffrey towards her solo exhibition in Wexford Arts Centre. Distinct from the curatorial support, Serena was also mentored by artist Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh. wexfordartscentre.ie