IT is hard to think of a more eventful art year; in fact, I doubt if there has ever been one so crammed and intensive in the history of Irish art - or rather, since many of the events were imported ones, of art in Ireland. This is enormously heartening in itself. Even allowing for the current (and quite uncritical) flow of media hype and the self congratulatory, what a nation of geniuses we are mood of the public, it does go some way to proving what genuine creative vitality there is in certain areas (not all!) of contemporary Irish culture.
Once again, much of the activity was outside Dublin, but Dublin itself more than justified itself. IMMA mounted two major retrospectives: the Sean Scully exhibition of midsummer and the Louis le Brocquy retrospective to mark his reaching 80 years of age. The second of these is still running, while the other received massive attention; and while I am not an out and out Scully idolator, as an exhibition it was notably solid, satisfying and (unavoidable word) painterly. The Glen Dimplex Award show ran true to form and had an impressively varied entry - though personally I did not agree with the choice of winner, which in my opinion ought to have been Marina Abramovic.
The L'Imaginaire Irlandais promotion of the summer was energetic and varied (there were more exhibitions by Irish artists mounted in Paris and other French centres than a single critic could get round to viewing) but it left some blanks and question marks. The venue for the main exhibition, the Beaux Arts on the Paris quays, was frankly an awkward and inadequate one, a factor which threw matters off balance from the start. That exhibition itself, too, was curiously uneven in quality, and the mixture of paintings, photographs, sculpture, conceptualism, video etc. somehow failed to cohere or come together as a whole. However, an ambitious and imaginative venture, such as the entire promotion was, can only be assessed in the long term when its real effects begin to show, and at least it proclaimed to France that this country does have a visual culture.
Eigse Carlow came up with its usual well chosen programme, including an exhibition of John Hoyland's paintings and another of sculptures by Conor Fallon. Kilkenny Arts Week, once again, was well balanced and varied, but did not mount any single, special event which stood out and dominated the others. Galway Arts, Week offered an excellent visual programme, including a show of Kathe Kollwitz's graphic work and a fine exhibition by an almost unheralded Mexican (though Paris based) wood sculptor, Jorge du Bon. Cork and Belfast kept up a high level of activity, though I regret that I was unable to see as many of these events as I would have liked. More recently, the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny has brought an exceptional array of young talent into its annual Victor Treacy Award exhibition, the winner of which was Tom Climent.
A pleasant surprise was the RHA's best summer exhibition in years - virtually a come back from the dead, since 1995 had marked one of its low points. The annual Banquet Exhibition at the same venue, the RHA Gallagher Gallery, was rather a disappointment, but the combined Sean. McSweeney Conor Fallon exhibition there was outstanding on both counts. This travelled later to Sligo, a town which is rapidly establishing itself as the cultural capital of the north west.
The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, which had been rather stop go in the past decade, kept up a steady flow of exhibitions, all of them worthwhile and including the show of contemporary Austrian art which is still running there at the time of writing. It is now, once again, an active force in contemporary art and must be reckoned as such. The consistently active Douglas Hyde Gallery appears to have broadened its brief - it was, for a time, rather too narrowly and exclusively conceptualist - and, above all, it courageously continues to bring in exhibitions from outside the country and is not afraid to challenge public taste. The National Gallery mounted its big W.J. Leech show, which brought many little known works to light, some of them masterpieces and others merely examples of good, conventional painting.
AT the Gallery of Photography, the mere mention of the name of Robert Mapplethorpe has been enough to ignite interest. This large scale exhibition runs in two parts, of which the second due to begin early in the New Year. And earlier, virtually every venue in the Temple Bar area had been pressed into service for the Temple Bar Print International, which brought in exhibitors from many countries as well as Irish ones.
As for the private galleries, regrettably there is insufficient - space here to record their highs and lows in any detail. But the William Scott show at the Kerlin, and that of le Brocquy's recent paintings at the Taylor Galleries, deserve special mention.
As far as artist of the year is concerned, I am torn in too many ways at once, after a year which offered such an embarrassment of riches. However, my choice would fall on the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery; though it contained rather few works, it nevertheless managed to convey the originality of this remarkable Franco American sculptor, now in her eighties.
