ONCE AGAIN, Galway, Arts Festival has come up with a very good and varied programme of exhibitions, in spite of the city's paucity of exhibition spaces. This latter drawback, of course, is to be rectified shortly by the building of a local municipal gallery. Meanwhile, as Eigse Carlow has already shown and as this festival emphasises, a goodly percentage of the most interesting art events continue to take place outside Dublin with all due respect to IMMA, the RHA Gallery, the Douglas Hyde etc.
The graphic work of Kathe Kollwitz (UCG Art Gallery) has been seen before in Ireland and in any case is much reproduced, but that does not lessen its immediacy and emotional impact. She came a generation before Expressionism, and, like Barlach and Corinth, she shared its monumentalism and its tendency to overstatement. In fact, Kollwitz is almost a propagandising artist, and certainly a "politically committed" one she had a firm social conscience, knew from first hand experience the sufferings of working class mothers, and was passionately anti-war. The loss of a son in the Great War enhanced this, so it was not by chance that Barlach used her face for the floating figure in his famous war memorial at Gustrow.
Kollwitz is obviously an artist with a message, but though she is sometimes over obvious and proselytising, she was an exacting technician who never took short cuts or tried for easy effects. There is thinking power in her work as well as emotion, and she was also a sharp observer, a woman who bore witness" to the terrible times she lived through and had the gift to simplify without being simplistic. As a graphic artist, she is in a European tradition which embraces Munch, Daumier, Goya and even Rembrandt.
To see the graphic works of Miro (Galway Arts Centre) is to move to another world, since Miro possessed what Kathe Kollwitz had not even a hint of a sense of humour. And while she was puritanical and stark particularly in her use of colour Miro was exuberant and baroque, though he also know how to be very spare and economical. He loved to improvise he experimented endlessly in effects of texture and contrast, and had the taste for sexual fantasy which was such a marked feature of surrealism.
This, by the way, is not the exhibition mounted at the National Gallery, it is a separate one supplied by the Maeght Foundation and comprises 60 lithographs and etchings. Though Miro was of course a major painter, it is arguable that his graphic works are his most personal and untrammelled, his own handwriting so to speak. Some of the lithos, in particular, reveal tones and textures and imagery which you may look for in vain among his paintings.
At the Aula Maxima in UCG there is an exhibition of wood sculptures by Jorge du Bon, a Franco Mexican artist now based in, Paris, who has a considerable reputation both in Europe and the New World. These have a certain Constructivist character, but without obvious geometric rigour or the almost impersonal finish typical of most Constructivist sculptors. In fact, they exuberantly proclaim the processes by which they were shaped, including a whole variety of cuts and tool marks, and they also stress the natures and textures of the individual types of wood used. These include familiar ones such as walnut and cedar, but more exotic timbers are employed too, some of them from Africa.
A number of the pieces are free standing, rather in the style of totems or ritual figures, while others are sit on the ground constructions with complex forms and joints and equally complex sculptural rhythms. A few open out into interlocking squares like an old fashioned box camera, while others are hollowed out almost like dug out canoes. The range of invention is remarkable, and the exhibition as a whole radiates a positive energy which is at once organic" and disciplined.
Two Dublin born artists long resident in the West, John Behan and Brian Bourke, join hands at the Kenny Gallery in a "the matic" exhibition which pays tribute to the Druid Theatre now 21 years old. In graphic works and sculpture, it records impressions and memories of some recent Druid productions, notably Friel's The Loves of Cass Maguire. This was an excellent idea or initiative, whoever thought it up first, and the material suits both artists very neatly.
Bourke's drawings show rehearsals, backstage scenes, personalities, and stage highlights, all set down with genuine panache. Behan's handful of figurative sculptures are robust and straight forward, and they are complemented by some sensitive and atmospheric drawings by him which add an unexpected dimension.
In the Bridge Mills Gallery, near at hand, there is an interesting, though slightly precious, exhibition of paintings by Noelle Donnellan. It alternates between spacious, rather billowy semi landscape works and small, linear, almost cartoonish pieces which sometimes incorporate lines of text.
PATRICIA Hurl's installation in the University College Hospital, entitled The Eve Factor, could have been preachy and pretentious in the now over familiar women and their bodies vein in fact, it is cogent and inventive and full of forceful draughtsmanship.
A combination of time pressures and a particularly fierce, almost blinding headache the aftermath of a week long bout of what might be termed Frustrated Flu unfortunately restricted my viewing of three characterful, strongly contrasting exhibitions in the Corbett court Car Park Gallery, near Eyre Square. These were, respectively, by Patrick O'Reilly, Anja Sammon and Bill Christman.
Of these, O'Reilly's is called The Monkey Trap and is the most elaborate of the three and also, I should say, the most original. Nominally he is a sculptor, but the term is a loose one and the effect is more of a series of tableaux or installation pieces. Subtracting a shallow layer of slightly jejune satire and easy hits, it is full of invention, humour, fantasy and technical resource in fact, almost too fertile in ideas for its own good, which is no bad complaint at all. Perhaps a certain thinning out here and there would have helped rather than hindered? I leave the question open.
