What Galway Arts Festival's visual arts strand lacks in profile, it makes up for in variety, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
The Galway Arts Festival has traditionally been big on spectacle, with the visual arts strand per se forming a relatively low-key adjunct to the pyrotechnic highlights. This year's strand is even more low-key than usual, which may reflect a conscious trimming of resources. Admittedly, there is a video art element to one of the spectacles, Helena Jonsdottir's dance theatre piece, Open Source. And then there's the spectacle of Galway Council's own vast sculptural installation, Eyre Square, a sprawling work-in-progress that is best described as a vivid allegory of urban chaos, and really has to be seen to be believed.
With a social intervention on that scale to contend with, visiting Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm, who specialises in small-scale social interventions, clearly has his work cut out for him. Wurm enacts, or invites others to enact, mildly transgressive events, tiny incidents that prompt a second glance and make you wonder whether you saw what you saw. He was out and about in Galway during the month of May, and evidence of his presence, in photographic form, is sited throughout the city centre: a figure balancing precariously on beer cans, or the artist himself having a spot of lunch, including plate. Like several other good things in the festival, Wurm's work is low-key, even oblique, and none the worse for that.
Not everything is low-key, though. There is a lot of volatile colour crammed into Graham Knuttel's Retrospective at the Bold Art Gallery. The prospect of seeing a retrospective of Knuttel's work is intriguing but, despite the title, you won't find it at Bold Art. Perhaps the use of the term is a joke on the artist's part, but certainly pretty much everything in the show looks of a piece, as though it was all made within a relatively short period of time. Except, perhaps, for the Aubusson tapestries, which dominate and, being labour-intensive, obviously took quite a long time to weave and are expertly done.
The imagery features Knuttel's stock cast of noir-ish characters, sharp- featured glossy women and gangsterish men in suits, everyone shifty-eyed with mutual suspicion. It's a theatrical milieu, verging on the caricaturish, and merges seamlessly with his other preferred subject matter, including Punch and Judy and Henri Rousseau-like fantasy.
Although he is technically and otherwise able, Knuttel is inclined to settle for well-tried, facile effects, which is a pity because he does have a sense of colour and design. Too many of the paintings look as if they were made by rote. On the whole, the tapestries, by virtue of their beautiful surfaces and clever use of colour, fare better.
The culmination of Inside/Out, a joint exhibition by Nora Maycock and Wanda Yu-Ying Hu at the Arts Centre, features two understated but remarkably effective video installations by the latter. Theirs is a difficult show to describe, because they adopt a variety of approaches. Yet it all works together. In different ways they are both concerned with embodiment, boundaries and sense experience.
Maycock takes the idea of mapping, charting the movement of bodies through architectural space - the gallery itself - and making of their accumulated traces of movement an "embodied" surface: pendulous folds of canvas drapery that cover an entire wall and frame the marble fireplace in one of the centre's beautifully proportioned first-floor rooms. It's visually striking and sensually evocative.
The engagement with the immediate architectural surround is particularly notable here and in Yu-Ying Hu's video pieces, one of which alludes to the way we instinctively look to an outside from a contained space, and the other, a small coup-de-théâtre, that plays ingeniously with our sense of touch and our perceptions of depth and scale by confronting us with a moving image of a living membrane. Surprise plays an important part here and too full a description would undo that, but suffice to say that Skin is a terrific work, really worth seeing.
Threads is an appropriate title for Sharon O'Malley's show of paintings, also at the Arts Centre. In her compositions, O'Malley draws on an eclectic fund of mythological imagery, pointing to an underlying unity, a common concern with fundamental human experiences, à la Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. She also relates myth directly to both historical and everyday, prosaic events in the classical and contemporary worlds. But rather than belabouring the idea of an underlying coherence, she is content to regard it as implicit, never feeling the need to draw the threads too tightly together. The rough, broken surfaces of her work recall the worn textures and faded colours of classical frescoes, and also suggest timelessness and recurrence. Her allusions to locations and narratives invite us to make our own connections between things. One area of weakness, though, is a stilted quality in some of the forms in the compositions.
In Colour and Touch, two good painters, Sinead Aldridge and Cian Donnelly, share the University Art Gallery at NUI Galway. Both are tactile artists in different senses of the term. Donnelly's remarkable Slice Paintings dispense with the need for any kind of support, canvas or otherwise, and make something concrete and tangible of paint itself. Built up in measurably thick layers, his pigment sandwiches, with their packed strata of luscious colours, look toy-like and immensely appealing, as if prompting the viewer to reach out and touch them (don't!).
One group of his paintings is iced over like cake with generous slabs of sugary-looking pigment. His pieces are both paintings and deconstructions of paintings.
For Aldridge, forms seem to coalesce and evolve out of the painting process itself. Her work is considered and astute, judiciously exploiting chance and design with a measured, self-critical eye, exploring ways of making marks, textures and forms with a lightness of touch that belies the attentiveness and concentration clearly involved.
There are echoes in her paintings of concerns evident in the work of Fiona Rae and Ronnie Hughes, but she has a strong and consistent identity of her own.
Two new bodies of work, by Brian Bourke and Jay Murphy, inaugurate a new commercial space in Salthill, the Norman Villa Gallery. Matisse once said something about exaggeration being fine so long as it was in the direction of truth, and Bourke is a master of exaggeration in that sense. His Portraits from Dominick Street emerged from a five-week residency at the Galway Arts Centre. He draws with a searching, incisive line, always looking for the structure, the way the flesh forms around the skeleton. Most of his pieces here are studies of heads, and they are good sculptural drawings. He has a few fuller-length figures, and they perhaps elicit something more from him. It would be interesting to see him make drawings of moving figures caught in momentary poses.
With Welcome to Galway, Mr Grosz, Murphy was inspired jointly by the German expressionist, George Grosz, and the 2003 Macnas Halloween Parade based on the Mexican Day of the Dead. In mellower vein, she also shows a nice series of landscape studies. It's true, though, that she has a flair for the luridly macabre side of showbiz, for the darkness underlying the glitter of carnival, and this comes through in her intricately worked treatments of Halloween.
Opening today at the Kenny Gallery, Sean McSweeney is a deservedly popular artist whose landscapes never fail to surprise and challenge. Subject to a last-minute change of venue, Jimmy Lawlor's surreal take on Irish rural life is up and running at 6 Prospect Hill. And you'd be mad to miss Tom Mathews's show of cartoons at Mulligan Records, not only because they are so funny but because, as original pieces of work, they are beautifully made by a master graphic artist.
Inside/Out is at Galway Arts Centre until August 7th; Sean McSweeney is at theKenny Gallery until August 5th; Brian Bourke and Jay Murphy are at the Norman Villa Gallery until August 6th; Colour and Touch is at NUI Galway until August 6th; and Jimmy Lawlor is at 6 Prospect Hill until August 6th. Other festival exhibitions end on July 25th
