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Visual Artists' News Sheet | November – December 2018
Martin Kippenberger and Wendy Judge after the opening of ‘Day in Dub’, an exhibition by Martin Kippenberger & Albert Oehlen, Kerlin Gallery, August 1991; photograph by Orla O’Brien
A Cherished Place DECLAN LONG PRESENTS AN OVERVIEW OF THE KERLIN GALLERY’S 30-YEAR HISTORY.
“Places you can go for free, run by strange people with visions who want to help artists by showing and selling their work”: this was Jerry Saltz, the New York art world’s notorious, necessary gadfly, writing in praise of Chelsea galleries right after Hurricane Sandy had flooded basements, damaged exhibition spaces and indiscriminately destroyed countless works of art. Galleries come and go; we might love them or loathe them; but in that moment of devastation, Saltz felt a need to make a stirring case for their defence: fundamentally, he said, “I love them. All. More than ever.” Free places, strange people: these seem, in general, like good things. In Dublin, right now, there are quite a few versions of this special combination. There are venturesome, commendably crazy people with an against-theodds enthusiasm for finding and showing art they love, working long-term with artists they admire. And there are places, sometimes a little out of the way, just off our habitual routes, that, on the best days, offer free entry to new worlds. The Kerlin gallery, this year celebrating three decades in Dublin, is one such place. And it’s run by people who might be glad (I hope) to be called strange: motivated by out-of-the-ordinary commitment to art that pushes limits, prompts new thoughts, offers surprising pleasures, gets under our skin or takes us somewhere we’ve never been. The pre-history of the current Kerlin occurred in Belfast: it was there that gallery founders John Kennedy and David Fitzgerald met and forged a partnership in the 1980s. But the Kerlin consolidated itself after a move to Dublin in 1988, opening its first space on Dawson Street. The first show in that location was, by current standards, relatively conservative: paintings by Clement McAleer. But McAleer’s rigorous and restless landscapes nonetheless established a questioning, questing spirit, with regard to the representation of place, in Ireland and elsewhere, that would be a vital aspect of the Kerlin’s continuing programme. Other early shows in Dublin included some by artists – who would maintain ongoing relationships with the gallery – whose work engaged intelligently and inventively with the depiction of cherished, contested or corrupted places: Stephen McKenna, Elizabeth Magill, Barrie Cooke. Like it or not, this was a subject that resonated under the inevitable, oppressive influence of the Troubles in the north – a formative, regressive political context for the gallery’s progressive cultural disposition – even if these artists didn’t necessarily engage that topic head-on. Other artists who came a little later to the Kerlin, such as Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright, most certainly did – in ways that had profound influence well beyond this island. Even in the early stages of the Dublin gallery’s schedule, there were exhibitions by numerous artists who became pivotal to key trajectories of Irish art (though not all, of course, were Irish) and who had, moreover, established significant presences outside Ireland too: Richard Gorman, Brian Maguire, Dorothy Cross, David Godbold and Kathy Prendergast. The opening of a new space in 1994 added further substance and style to the gallery’s profile, raising the levels of its reputation and expanding its capacity for display. Designed by the British
