At the Galway Arts Centre, Meeting-Rencontre- Begegnung marks the culmination of a series of residencies and exhibitions begun in 1996, involving artists from Galway's own Artspace Studios and artists from the Lorient School of Fine Art in France and Der Anker in Ludwigshafen, Germany. After visits abroad, last summer it was the turn of the Irish artists to play host to their European companions, and this exhibition is the result of a group engagement with Galway and areas as far afield as Connemara and the Burren. It's an ambitious venture that has, perhaps surprisingly, resulted in a strong and stylistically diverse, though thematically coherent, show.
Presumably, for the Galway-based artists, it was to a large extent business as usual - but judging by their work many of the visitors took to the city and surroundings with great energy and enthusiasm, producing some genuinely fine responses. Sometimes the impact is obvious. Christopher Metayer is a good, thoughtful landscape painter. His three views of Galway are agreeable, but when he gets to grips with Dun Duchathair on Inishmore he produces strikingly good, memorable images.
In a grid of digitally manipulated photographs and text, Gunther Beriejung and Gabi Blinne juxtapose fragments of romantic poetry with various stereotypical views of Ireland. It sounds distinctly corny, but in practice the tension between the material and its jazzy presentation encapsulates the problematic layering of modernity over myth. There are no particularly local echoes in Werner Schaub's witty, photographed vignettes integrating sci-fi dolls and little religious figures, but it's a great idea.
Among the Irish-based artists, Catherine O Leanachain's tree studies have a gentle, tactful presence that, especially in the work on paper, has a distinctly Eastern feel; Marja van Kampen's busy city views are vibrant and atmospheric; Kathleen Furey sensitively treats a range of objects like archaeological treasures; while Tony Magner's installation, a Ceremonial Cloak of "woven" wood is the strongest sculptural piece.
Inevitably, sheep loom large in the Galway work and also in R.H. Hodicke's West of Ireland Paintings at the RHA Gallagher Gallery. The German artist, who sprang to prominence with the advent of Neo-Expressionism in the late 1970s, has visited Ireland regularly since then, and he has produced a physically imposing though fairly tangential body of work here. There are just a few basic motifs. He is best on sheep and sheep bones, which he invests with an elemental, mythic presence in series of rough-hewn, bravura images. Fuchsia flowers provide a decorative but rather less rewarding source of inspiration, while studies of stolid farmers concentrating on pints of Guinness have humour and a certain darkness. It's all enjoyable but slight.
Chris Doris, recently in the headlines for his 40-day sojourn atop The Reek, is showing a major group of works at the Ashford Gallery. The pieces in Unearth are nominally monoprints, but everything about them stretches the term, including their scale. The main group is made on enormous sheets of hand-made Indian paper. Then, rather than taking one impression, Doris has built up each piece from multiple impressions. The use of such hand-made paper can become a fetish that inhibits an artist, but not here. He exploits the robustness of the thick, textured sheets and lets each one accumulate a vivid history of blobs, hand-prints, splashes, smears and tears, though it's important to emphasise that he is always respectful of his materials. The acquired history of each piece is fully evident in its finished state. It is good to see an Irish artist working with such confidence and ambition. The works are, in effect, a profound dialogue with the landscape of Mayo, where Doris lives and where they were made. Several are extremely impressive, including the black monolith of Dead Farm and the long scar of Motor- way Excavation.
Both Michael Coleman and Barbara Freeman have very good print shows, at the Graphic Studio and Original Print galleries, respectively. Coleman uses black a great deal, building towards a really deep, sonorous blackness or letting a strong underlying colour glow through a lighter layer - or sometimes emerge as a Barnett Newman-like "zip" in the centre of the composition. Looking at the way he runs expertly and - apparently - easily through the scales, it occurred to me that The Well-Tempered Print (Bk I) would be an appropriate title for the show.
Freeman's prints are also beautifully controlled. The drama here derives from hard-edged insertions of angular forms into the stillness of a grid. I think her prints are better than the paintings she's showing at the Rubicon, which are roughly similar but, in relative terms, fussier, and she is overly fond of a corrugated surface texture which, agreeable in small doses, has become an intrusive stylistic mannerism.
Amanda Ralph's Coronor Regrets, at Temple Bar, is a rather grim installation based on her attendance at the Coronor's Court as an observer over some 18 months. Pews are arranged facing two video projections which meet at right angles. Both portray images of the surface of the Liffey, suggesting various associations with death. A narrator recounts a relentless litany of "sudden, unnatural and violent death". The circumstances of each death are concisely reported, but for the most part it is surprisingly easy to fill in the gaps, to flesh out the picture. In the end, as Mick Wilson notes in an accompanying essay, her project becomes a way of bearing witness, a personal expression of regret.
Padraig Mac Miadhachain, at the Molesworth Gallery, is something of an enigma. A Belfast-born artist who has been based on the Dorset coast since the late 1950s, he has exhibited extensively in Britain but, apparently, hardly at all here since the 1960s. This show is a quasi-retrospective, with some pieces dating from the 1950s, but most made within the last 20 years. Practically everything is very small in scale, and the work, while thoroughly capable in execution and often attractive, wears its influences on its sleeve in a slightly disconcerting way. Sometimes it's as if we're looking at playful, decorative variations on William Scott, Peter Lanyon or Patrick Heron, with Nicolas de Stael putting in an appearance every now and then. Mac Miadhachain's own identity takes a back seat.
Meeting-Rencontre-Begegnung is at Galway Arts Centre until September 25th; K.H.Hodicke's West of Ireland Paintings are at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until October 3rd; Chris Doris's Unearth is at the Ashford Gallery until September 30th; Michael Cole- man's prints are at the Graphic Studio Gallery until October 2nd; Barbara Freeman's prints are at the Original Print Gallery until September 29th, and her paintings are at the Rubicon Gallery until September 25th; Amanda Ralph's Coronor Regrets is at Temple Bar until September 24th; Padraig MacMiadhachain's paintings are at the Molesworth Gallery until September 30th
