Painter, designer and campaigner Robert Ballagh is taking centre-stage again with characteristic zeal. One of Ireland's busiest artists talks to Aidan Dunne
For a man at the centre of a veritable maelstrom of activity, Robert Ballagh looks surprisingly relaxed. Just back in his studio from a meeting of the Irish Visual Artists' Rights Organisation (Ivaro), he is surrounded by the work that forms a substantial part of his retrospective, which opens on Friday at Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery. Meanwhile, his first theatrical set, made originally for a 1976 production of Samuel Beckett's I'll Go On, is revived tonight at the Gate Theatre, a substantial exhibition (something like 100 pieces) of Work from the Studio will open at the Gorry Gallery in Dublin next week, An Post is holding an exhibition of 66 of its stamps he has designed over the years, and, in October, there's a project at the Axis Art Centre in Ballymun.
An architectural scale model of the interior of the Gallagher Gallery occupies centre-stage in his studio. For the retrospective, the building's huge open space is being transformed into a network of interlinked rooms. In the scale model, colour reproductions of the paintings are arranged around the walls. Ballagh smiles sheepishly. Well, yes, he has substantially remodelled the entire interior of the gallery.
"I wanted to lead the visitors through, to set up a story. There is a logic; the order is fairly chronological," he says.
Having won sponsorship, he enlisted the team he'd worked with on theatre sets. "These guys are amazing," he says. "They really know what they're doing. It was still tense though. A scale model is one thing, but until you see the reality you don't know if it's going to work. But then the other day I walked the spaces with the production manager - I must be one of the few artists to have their own production manager - and we thought, yes, this will work."
When Ballagh takes on a project, any project, he applies himself to it with a zeal bordering on obsessiveness. A methodical, detailed thinker, he is also a bit of a showman. His coup de théâtre for the retrospective is a self-portrait garbed only in a pair of boxer shorts. But the shorts, a present from friends who visited Florence, are cunningly illustrated with the mid-section of Michelangelo's heroically nude David. Displayed on publicity posters, it's a cheeky, provocative image, and one that's likely to get noticed.
"It's called Self-Portrait in the Italian Style," Ballagh says. "I thought it was funny to take this icon of youthful beauty and vigour and re-do it in the guise of this pot-bellied auld fella."
Not that Ballagh has to try very hard to attract attention. In the wider public arena, he is probably the best-known Irish artist, partly because of his immensely accessible paintings but partly, as well, because he maintains a public profile in other ways, not least by taking the Government to court over its failure to implement the droit de suite, the artist's resale right. He is also unusually articulate in airing strong views on a wide range of issues, so that he is something of a public commentator, on a par with professional political and journalistic pundits.
Even within the art arena, his experience is exceptionally broad, spanning fine art, graphic design, photography, stamp and banknote design, theatre design, political activism and, in the early days, music, as bass guitarist with a rock'n'roll band called The Chessmen, managed by a young impresario named Noel Pearson. Overall, Ballagh is probably the closest thing we have to an Irish equivalent of David Hockney.
LIKE HOCKNEY, HE has established a cultural niche for himself slightly apart from the artworld per se. While championing the rights of artists in various ways, not least his involvement with the erstwhile Artists Association of Ireland (AAI), Ballagh has been critical of aspects of the art world and the direction art has taken in the recent past. When Patrick Murphy returned from the US to take up his current position as director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery, he remarked that one of the things that surprised him about the scene here was that no one had yet organised a Ballagh retrospective. It was something that should so obviously have been done.
In fact, Ballagh himself takes a judicious, surprisingly mellow view of the art world's relative neglect of him.
"In a way, it was partly bad planning on my part," he says. "After David Hendriks died [Hendriks, who died in 1983, was his dealer], I thought, well, I don't need a gallery, I can look after all that myself. But I underestimated the extent to which the art world revolves around the private galleries. There's a kind of established order there. So I sort of slipped out of the consciousness of the art world. Then I was involved with the AAI and doing other things."
Oddly enough, the AAI did lead him in unexpected directions as regards his own work. Attendance at international conferences led to invitations to show in eastern Europe.
"I think I had about five retrospective shows in various cities, including Moscow," he says. "When I was in Moscow they told me that I was only the second western artist to have a retrospective there. The other was Francis Bacon. I think his was purely on merit and mine was down to pull."
Not that he was ever idle or not in demand in Ireland. Apart from his work for An Post and the theatre, he has been consistently popular as a portrait painter, though, as he notes, he takes forever to complete a portrait (it's that process of exhaustive research and attention to detail). He mostly paints in a very slow, traditional manner, building up images in layers of thin, transparent glazes. His portraits of Bernadette Greevy, Noel Browne, Gordon Lambert and Michael Farrell are all typical of his style with their mix of conscientious attentiveness to traditional virtues, their conceptual inventiveness and their liking for puns.
"I always ask a subject if there's anything they'd really like to have in the picture," he says. In the case of the late Michael O'Riordan (whom he admired enormously), Ballagh thought he'd come a cropper. "Michael said he'd been awarded something like 47 medals by the Soviet Union and I thought, oh no, I'm going to have to paint the lot. But then he said there was only one he cared about, and that was for veterans of the Spanish Civil War." It's duly there in the portrait, which is framed like a religious icon in reference to O'Riordan's stormy relationship with the church. "And by the way," Ballagh adds," I invented the tie with the hammer-and-sickle motif. He wasn't really wearing that."
Ballagh began his artistic career by working as an assistant to the late Michael Farrell. While he has been dubbed Ireland's first Pop artist, and not without reason, the tag tends to trivialise his concerns. In fact, his work has always incorporated an element of political critique, dramatically so on occasion, as when he staged a performance piece relating to the events of Bloody Sunday and involving animal blood, at the Project Arts Centre as part of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1972. Equally, a series of homages to David, Goya and Gericault were politically pertinent.
LATTERLY HE HAS been a forthright republican, though, as he has pointed out, not an advocate of the armed struggle and not a card-carrying member of any organisation. It's simply that he sees the artist as being part of society and as being duty-bound to engage with issues of the day and with the broader questions underlying political and social structures.
His portrait of Gerry Adams is a reworking of one of the most iconic images in art history, Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Mists, a visionary masterpiece in which an isolated traveller gazes out over a vista of summits. It's been co-opted in numerous contexts since, sometimes coloured by the fact that Hitler was said to have been a big fan. "One day, Gerry Adams dropped by and said did I fancy coming for a stroll," Ballagh says. "I thought he meant down the road, but he brought me up Black Mountain."
That planted the seed of the idea for the portrait. It was hard to pin down Adams to get the necessary reference shots, though. Then one day Ballagh got a call to go to Monaghan. "I took the photographs in a car-park, and then transposed him to Cave Hill - which is where the United Irishmen were actually founded."
Through Adams, Ballagh became involved in the West Belfast Arts Festival.
As part of the retrospective, Riverdance will be showing on a plasma screen. Ballagh provided a succession of painted images for the set, a fortuitous, if difficult, commission which earned him ongoing royalties. At the time, he had a meeting with Moya Doherty and John McColgan.
"Moya had this conviction that the set should consist of images projected on to backdrops," Ballagh says. "She said they wanted about 50 or 60 images and they were opening in three months. 'Mmm, that's interesting,' I said, thinking, how the hell am I going to do that?"
He did it by abandoning his usual technique and instead painting wet on wet, very fast.
The retrospective should prove to be a popular show, not least because Ballagh has applied himself to it with a characteristically intense level of commitment. All in all, he seems pleased with it.
"There were a few disappointments, about three paintings that it was impossible to get, but that's probably inevitable," he says.
He takes an old-fashioned view of survey shows. "It used to be that you had one retrospective in your lifetime," he says. "That seems right. Now artists seem to have them at regular intervals, but after all this I can tell you I won't be doing another one for a very long time."
Robert Ballagh: A Retrospective is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Ely Place, Dublin, from Fri. I'll Go On, with Barry McGovern, opens tonight at the Gate Theatre
