Open for viewing: 10 exhibitions worth looking out for in the next few months
Muscle opens at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.
Austin McQuinn’s new paintings on ash wood panels and found, antique prints were made specifically for the double-height atrium and galleries at STAC.
Also featured is a 17-foot stack of Aran sweaters, referencing the Norman tower houses of South Tipperary. From midnight on Saturday 22nd April, McQuinn will present Imperial Lunatic, a 24-hour live performance inspired by biopower and queer energy, at STAC Chapel, in the former Kickham Army Barracks.
Irish artists Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and Amanda Coogan are represented alongside René Magritte, Henry Moore and Joseph Wright of Derby in this major exhibition of work responding to the idea of the cave as “the domain of gods and monsters, saints and shamans, births and burials.” Reflecting on how some of the earliest known artworks were depictions of animals and human beings on the walls of caves, Hollow Earth includes work in traditional media such as painting, as well as contemporary practices such as photography, sound, installation, video and architectural models.
A collaborative exhibition by two well-established artists. Bugler works in print, sculpture, found objects and mixed media. Much of his oeuvre relates to the folklore associated with the sea and ocean travel. Printed ephemera and other materials collected on his own travels have inspired much of the work in this exhibition. Meanwhile, Breen’s paintings are often inspired by old books and photographs, and relate to the role of work in contemporary society, particularly the relationship between the pressure to earn money and the pursuit of happiness.
Created by Anna Furse, muscle is an immersive experience that takes visitors on an audio-guided journey through the Crawford’s collection of Canova Casts. It engages with contemporary notions of beauty and perfection, as well as with the Ancient Greek cultivation of body and mind in service to the State. Also featured is a new film called women talking – muscle, a question of power, which features the voices of a soldier, a pole dancer, a bodybuilder, a fashion model, a para-athlete and a 73-year-old dancer/choreographer.
Kevin O’Farrell has spent over 20 years photographing three generations of the Hegarty family in their unique yard at Oldcourt, Skibbereen, working on the restoration of vessels such as the AK Ilen, the last traditional wooden, ocean-going sailing ship built in Ireland, and the Saoirse, the 42-foot ketch on which Connor O’Brien circumnavigated the world in the 1920s. O’Farrell’s images are as beautifully crafted as the boats themselves.
Ireland’s largest and longest-running exhibition of visual art will feature hundreds of works in paint, drawing, print, sculpture, photography and architecture. As usual, most will be selected by open submission, with the rest being provided by RHA members and invited artists. There will be over €70,000 in prizes. The exhibition will also mark the launch of celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the RHA being granted a royal charter by King George IV.
Unseeing Traces is a collaboration between IMMA and Ireland’s largest independent migrant-led national network, the New Communities Partnership. It features hundreds of artefacts – many of them associated with traditional rituals and ceremonies - inherited by the NCP’s Community Development Coordinator, Nasser Aidara, from the Kingdom of Kongo. The kingdom, which splintered in the early 1900s, included what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and the Congo Republic.
A survey exhibition by the veteran abstract painter, Living Through Paint(ing) features Gorman’s large and typically robust works in oils on canvas as well as more delicate works on the handmade kozo washi paper he sources in Japan. Gorman was born in Dublin, educated at Trinity College and Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, and has mostly been based in Milan since the 1980s. The historian Roy Foster has contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue.
The first exhibition in Ireland by New York-based Anne Collier focuses on images of the artist’s own eyes as well as those sourced from photography manuals, advertisements, comic books, film stills and album sleeves, with a particularly emphasis on the mechanics of analogue photography. Collier’s work considers our emotional and psychological attachment to images, and how photography relates to memory, melancholia and loss.
Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore have revelled in their status as the art world’s most lovable provocateurs for the past six decades. They regard themselves as “living sculptures,” but are best known for their large-scale photographic works, often on subversive subjects. The two have recently opened a museum - dedicated to themselves - in Spitalfields in the East End of London, where they have lived since 1968.
