Carving out a new adventure

Visual Arts. Cloudburstingat the Stone Gallery marshals work by several recent fine art graduates and is a very good group show, diverse and ambitious. It includes old media and new, ranging across painting, sculpture, photography and video installation.

The work on view is also, by the way, extraordinarily good value. Kevin Cosgrove is one of the best painters to emerge among this year's graduates. His low-key paintings have a casual air about them. In a quiet, unobtrusive way they carve out a focused area of exploration relating to growing up and a sense of discovery and adventure linked to manual crafts and outdoor activities.

It sounds quirky but it is really persuasive as Cosgrove elucidates it in understated, beautifully observed paintings drawn, one suspects, from a variety of sources. He is exceptionally good on painting light, whether the noonday sun in the open or light filtering through doorways and opening in interior spaces. Dianne Whyte is one of the best photographers to graduate this year, and her hushed, meditative images of the interior of a deserted institutional building recall Dutch painting of the golden age.

Anne Helion's use of camouflage pattern as metaphor was extremely effective in her graduate work and it looks equally strong in the gallery. Louise Roberts offers an intriguing rationale for her paintings and Philip Lee shows just one, very atmospheric piece.

Sophie Linehan is a strikingly accomplished sculptor who uses elaborate fabricated props in video and live performance pieces.

Tracy Hanna infiltrates fictional spaces in ingenious ways in her video works, creating some fascinating effects. It is in all a very well curated show that highlights the range and quality of current graduates.

In Doppelganger at Kevin Kavanagh, Alison Pilkington presents a series of paintings with their putative doubles. That is, in each case she made a painting and then made another version of it and, in one case, another version again, on a larger scale. It's an interesting idea for an exhibition. As she notes, artists often find themselves making what feels like the same work over and over again.

But she didn't set out to make slavish, exact copies of her own work.

She uses the same elements in each case in terms of palette and composition, but she also allows some flexibility into the process, so that the second version of a painting can take off in a slightly different direction.

In making and displaying the work, she plays with ideas of doubles, reflections and difference. This raises the tricky possibility that the point of the painting is what we don't see. One of the effects is to animate the space between the pairs of paintings. They are not diptychs, per se, but alternative versions of a single work. But where is that single work? Somewhere between the two, in the tensions that arise as we read the paintings in terms of their differences.

The paintings are made in an idiom of gestural, spontaneous abstraction, but Pilkington stands back, at one remove from the expressive element we might expect. Doubling the images in itself calls into question the notion of the unique, spontaneous gesture, but there is also a deliberately offhand quality to the mark-making, a kind of dispassionate curiosity. It's all delivered with great flair, displays good colour sense is genuinely exploratory.

For its current show of William Hogarth (1697-1764) engravings, Imma draws of one of its most exceptional and unexpected resources, the Madden Arnholz Collection, comprising 2000 Old Master prints, including 500 pieces by Hogarth, making it one of the most important Hogarth print collections extant. The broad humour, incisive satire and teeming vitality of Hogarth's work identifies it as a visual counterpart to the literature of his friend Henry Fielding, or Tobias Smollett. The raucous, unbridled quality of all of their work is characteristic of its era, and lends it an immediacy and freshness compared to the later primness of Victorian Britain.

Hogarth's great narrative series, including A Harlot's Progressand A Rake's Progress, have a novelistic sweep and ambition. They are extraordinary works that repay close attention. Every frame is crammed with layer upon layer of incident to an almost impossible degree. Life is played out as theatrical spectacle against the ramshackle stage of the modern city - very specifically London.

Hogarth is a sharp observer of human foibles but he is not a misanthrope, and in his work there is great affection for ordinary people and the difficulties they face. He has a strong moral sense, evident not only in his "moral subjects" including the Rake but also, vividly, in his contrasting Beer Street and Gin Lane in which he didactically preaches the iniquity of gin and its capacity to unravel the social fabric.

Perhaps unfairly, Hogarth's graphic work, which was understandably very popular during his lifetime, has tended to overshadow his standing as a painter.

But he was also a very fine painter. It's fair to say that his anecdotal narratives work better as engravings than as paintings, but many of his portrait paintings, for example, are beautifully made, revealing someone completely in tune with the medium rather than merely doing a descriptive job. That said, his graphic work is a remarkable achievement.

Hogarth is the subject of an outstanding biography by Jenny Uglow, which is subtitled A Life and a World. And rightly so, because her book has all the density and abundance of a Hogarth engraving or a novel by Henry Fielding. The exhibition, which is extremely well installed in the Gordon Lambert Galleries, is a treat.

• CloudburstingWork by recent graduates. Stone Gallery, 70 Pearse St, Dublin. Until Sept 9. DoppelgangerAlison Pilkington. Kevin Kavanagh, 66 Great Strand St, Dublin. Until Sept 8. William Hogarth: Prints from the Madden Arnholz Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Military Rd, Kilmainham, Dublin. Until Sept 9