William Crozier and Eithne Jordan: this week’s art highlights

ART

Eithne Jorden: Tableau Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Parnell Sq, Dublin, until January 14th, hughlane.ie
Once, figures were very much at the centre of Eithne Jordan's work but, some time ago, it became clear that their presence in it was diminishing, almost as though she had, like a hostess dealing with visitors who have outstayed their welcome, found a way of ushering them out. Their departure left her free to explore a world of spaces – interiors and exterior – in a quietly compelling way. The absence of figures doesn't produce a lack: there is a whole world in her work, just as Morandi's still lifes form a world. She seems drawn to dawn and twilight, and perhaps night, to hours when rooms and streets become deserted. This show features paintings based on interiors, many of them museums or historic buildings given over "to civic or commercial activities" - much like the Hugh Lane itself in Charlemont House. AD

ART

Shore Elke Thönnes and Susan Early

Graphic Studio Gallery, through the arch, off Cope St, Temple Bar, Dublin, until October 28th Complementary approaches to a shared subject matter in a well-balanced show. German-born, Elke Thönnes came to Ireland to study at NCAD, and stayed. She is a painter and printmaker. Her carborundum prints are usually quite large, and sensitive to the delicate atmospherics of the shoreline landscape, to broad expanses of mist, water, sand and sky. She is precise and subtle in her use of colour.     
Dublin-born Susan Early studied and work in architecture before becoming a printmaker. Her aquatint etchings are firmly anchored to place, usually though not always locations in Dublin Bay, and rigorous in their detailed observational exactitude. She excels at conveying the feeling of the inhabited shoreline: rugged, well worn, battered – but also scrubbed and scoured and made anew. Her panoramic views are especially eye-catching. AD

ART William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape

‘If a painting gets too pretty, drag it across the studio’

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Charged, haunted and unsettling: Paul Nugent approaches hysteria

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Francisco Goya and ‘the greatest anti-war manifesto in all art’

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[ imma.ie ]

William Crozier: Landscapes Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St, Dublin Until November 4th, taylorgalleries.ie

Best know for his boldly patterned, vibrant paintings inspired by the west Cork landscape (as in the Taylor Galleries show), William Crozier (who died in 2011) had a long and distinguished record as both an artist and teacher by the time he and his wife Katherine Croan put down roots in Ireland in the 1980s.

IMMA’s show focuses on his work from the 1950s and 1960s, when he was mostly in London, and it’s much different in feeling from the familiar landscapes, more in tune with the existential anxieties of the post-Holocaust world and the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Crozier stayed with Anthony Cronin in the south of Spain for a time in 1963, which he said influenced him greatly. He had a Picasso-esque ambition to tackle big themes and established his reputation with expressionist paintings of devastated landscapes, later inhabited by stark, skeletal human figures. AD

ART A Change in the Signal: Crystalline Siobhan McDonald

[ highlanes.ie ]

A set of Arctic plant pressings from the third Franklin expedition to the Arctic, in 1825, forms the centrepiece of Siobhan McDonald’s show (Sir John Franklin’s much lamented last expedition, in search of the Northwest Passage, in 1845, ended in disaster and death for all involved). The pressings, with seed samples collected by the expedition, form one of a number of approaches McDonald takes in reflecting on our position in the vast temporal space of geological time and our constantly changing relationship with the natural environment. Irene Buckley’s score accompanies film of an expeditionary vessel in the icy waters where Franklin ventured. AD