‘The Horse Show’ at Kinsale Art Week – curated by two self-confessed horse whisperers – sets out to restore the horse to high cultural ground

IIN THE AREA of fine art, the horse comes close to being a guilty secret, largely because there is a sub-genre of equine art that veers close to, and frequently strays into, kitsch. That’s according to Patrick Murphy and Gemma Tipton, the curators of the Horse Show, which forms the centrepiece exhibition of Kinsale Arts Week.

Many people are so nutty about horses they lose any external cultural perspective when pursuing the objects of their affection. Murphy and Tipton, as self-confessed horse whisperers, set themselves the task of constructing a show that is neither indulgent nor sentimental, and that restores the horse to high cultural ground.

They do so pretty effectively. There's a nice dialogue between David Chancellor's deservedly award-winning photograph Huntress with Buckand John Byrne's Misneach, a video account of a Ballymun commission that records the genesis of his contemporary version of an equestrian public monument that once stood in the Phoenix Park. Instead of Field Marshal Gough, a young girl from the local community is the model for the figure in the saddle, and we see how she relishes the idea.

Similarly, Chancellor’s imperious rider is a contemporary young woman, Diana the huntress in trainers, the slain buck draped across her mount. It’s a somewhat ambiguous image, taken from a series documenting the hunting industry in South Africa.

Explore the series in full and an overall ambivalence becomes apparent, but the challenging, iconic quality of this individual photograph is undeniable.

Made a few years back, Nevan Lahart's Everybody Knows a Horse sculpture # 1is a cardboard-and-adhesive tape sculpture of a fallen horse, a tragicomic reworking of the allegorical horse in Picasso's Guernica. The poor materials and its improvised, patchwork nature make it all the more moving.

In Simon Reilly’s short video, the horse assumes a symbolic role. We see the huge animal as a miraculous, unsettling vision from the point of view of a boy who sets about trying to recapture the experience in drawings. It’s an allegory of the creative impulse and those intimations of extraordinary possibility that inspire us to try to do what might seem impossible. That includes such work as, perhaps, Max Streicher’s trio of ethereal flying steeds, soaring high among the roof beams of the onetime grain store.

Hazel Walker's nicely understated painting, Frontier, sees the horse, caught in an urban context but within sight of unfenced land, as a symbol of potential freedom. There's a beautiful small bronze by the late Conor Fallon, one of Perry Ogden's Pony Kids, a virtuoso carving by Michael Quane, a characterful horse portrait by Nick Miller and a work by Ireland's pre-eminent equestrian painter, Peter Curling.

There are notable absences. An Irish horse show without a Basil Blackshaw is Hamletwithout the prince. A Blackshaw horse features in the catalogue and was apparently supposed to be included but was withdrawn.

Perhaps a substitute can be found for the show’s future fixtures. One of Brian Bourke’s horses, made with a nod to Gericault but based on observation of local horses in the landscape, would have been a nice addition. Ross Wilson has also made a particularly strong body of work centring on the horse. But The Horse Show is a very good, balanced thematic show.

Then there's the dark horse. Gaining quickly on the inside is Point to Point, a subsidiary show of works mostly on paper by artists we wouldn't associate with the horse. Many of them came up trumps. Martin Gale's The Greyis an exceptionally achieved miniature, a moody study of a horse in a mountain field with the lights of Dublin city spread out in the background. Eithne Jordan's urban horse in its cramped yard is also a full-scale painting on a miniature scale.

Anita Groener's All the King's Horseshelpfully comes with a magnifying glass to help us trace the intricacy of its equine cast; it's an amazing piece of work. Add Simon English, Gary Coyle, Sonia Shiel, Marc Reilly, Pam Carroll, Diana Copperwhite and you already have a fascinating show. Add more – and there is much more – and you have a show that is bursting at the seams of its allotted space. Unlike its companion, it won't tour, but it certainly deserves to.

The Horse Show, at KAW Art at the Mill, Kinsale, until July 31st. Later it can be seen at The Source in Thurles from September 1st to October 28th, Ballina Arts Centre November 10th to December 18th and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, January 13th to February 26th, 2012