VISUAL ARTS: When it opened last January, the National Gallery's Millennium Wing drew in the crowds with its inaugural exhibition featuring a varied, upbeat selection of works by the French Impressionists. More recently, its exhibition devoted to quite another class of French painter, Jules Breton, was much better in fact than it sounded in outline, writes Aidan Dunne
Paintings of French peasants do not sound wildly exciting (particularly with a €10 entrance tag), but the show was actually very good in subtle, unexpected ways. Breton's development of the model of an ideal, monumental female figure was striking. And it was a better show than the rather disappointing American Beauty which, despite its anecdotal and incidental moments, did not have sufficient first-rate work, and invited unflattering comparisons with the Tate's American Sublime, which more than delivered on the sublime.
The Butler Gallery in Kilkenny struck a nerve with its Paul McCarthy video show during the Arts Festival in August. McCarthy's strange, intense video performances led to the initiation of legal proceedings that still leave open the question of the certification of art videos, routinely screened in galleries public and private, not to mention every art college in the country. Unfortunately, attention tended to focus on the controversy rather than on the work, which is genuinely disturbing and taboo-breaking, but to a serious end.
German art photography has been enormously influential - and a lot of it is also just plain enormous - so it was good for the Irish public to check out the work of one of its prime exponents, Thomas Ruff, in depth at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Despite having endured a long season of torment, IMMA had a very good year in terms of shows and attendance figures - which, at around 290,000, were second only to the record breaking year of Andy Warhol in 1997. Willie Doherty's False Memory (still running at IMMA), a compact retrospective of his work since his initial photo-text pieces to recent, complex video and photographic installations, is exactly the kind of show that IMMA and other institutions should be doing in relation to Irish artists.
Orla Barry's Foundlings, at Temple Bar Gallery in July, was an extremely ambitious filmed meditation on memory and identity. While it had its shortcomings, it also had several really impressive sequences, strikingly memorable imagery and the range and complexity of a full-scale film.
John Noel Smith, newly returned to Ireland after many years in Berlin, kicked off a new series of Nissan-sponsored exhibitions at the RHA with a formidable exhibition of paintings. Shane Cullen's The Agreement was a typically ambitious project, uniting the resources of Artangel, Project, The Fire Station Studios, City Arts and more, to produce a monumental representation of the text of the Good Friday Agreement - just before, as it happened, the Northern Irish institutions were suspended.
Several municipal galleries came up with some fine shows. Limerick's City Gallery of Art had a particularly energetic year, and a jewel in the crown in the form of the immensely and rightly popular John Shinnors. The current Vivienne Dick film installation and Richard Slade's painting show there, plus an earlier survey of Gerard Byrne's photographic and installation work, must also rate very highly. Janet Mullarney came up trumps for the Crawford in Cork with a group of remarkably accomplished pieces. Margaret Fitzgibbon's Hortus Conclusus was an engrossing installation at the same venue. Patrick Scott's fine retrospective at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery was particularly intriguing for the light it cast on his early paintings and his substantial work in tapestry. At the Hugh Lane as well, Sean Shanahan's Vidar was a remarkably uncompromising installation of abstract paintings made specifically with the architectural setting in mind.
The RHA's Eurojet Futures was lively and balanced with strong showing from all included artists: Amanda Coogan, Vanessa O'Reilly, Paul Nugent, Amy O'Riordan, Stephen Brandes, David Timmons and Ollie Comerford. Of the graduate shows, Cork's Crawford stood out for the sheer ambition of the work, a great deal of which was extremely accomplished. Barbara Warren makes a good subject for the current retrospective at the RHA. Meanwhile, the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo used its expanded, upgraded space inventively with substantial exhibitions by Grace Weir and Hughie O'Donoghue.
Among the outstanding solo shows in the commercial galleries were those by Michael Coleman, Simon English, Gary Coyle, Margaret Corcoran, Paul Doran, Willie Heron, Arno Kramer, Sean McSweeney, Makiko Nakamura, Maeve McCarthy, Rita Duffy, Ollie Comerford, Darren Murray, Marie Hanlon, Andrew Folan, Billy Foley and Stuart Shils. In terms of the galleries themselves, the Cross, Kevin Kavanagh and 5@Guinness Storehouse all did good work, the latter usually in the form of compact group shows. In non-commercial spaces, Eoghan McTigue at Project, Susan McWilliam at the Butler, Gerard Byrne who seemed to be everywhere, and Jose Bedia at the RHA all stand out.
