Dominated by an impressive retrospective of work by Chung Eun-Mo, Galway's visual-arts season offers much, writes Aidan Dunne.
Third time around and Tulca, Galway's season of visual arts, is stronger than ever, having re-formed itself into a distinct organisation, a co-operative entity, pooling the resources of some eight arts organisations in the region. It is a feature of Tulca that it encompasses exhibitions, performances, seminars, talks and residencies - that it addresses the role and status of the visual arts in the wider social fabric. It's interesting that both Alan Phelan's Newtownwhowhatwhere? and Aisling O'Biern's Hometown (at Galway Arts Centre and Galway County Hall, respectively) look closely at place and community, local and personal histories. And at Carnaun National School, in Athenry, John Langan is researching the way artists' residencies work in educational settings.
Since the early 1990s the Korea-born, Italy-based painter Chung Eun-Mo has developed close links with Ireland, exhibiting here regularly, at the Fenderesky Gallery, in Belfast, and the Kerlin Gallery and IMMA, in Dublin. So she is a good choice for a 15-year retrospective and an ideal one as the centrepiece exhibition for Tulca, because Galway Arts Centre's Dominick Street galleries are particularly sympathetic to painting, and Chung's elegant compositions sit there very comfortably.
Chung was born in Seoul, although she has spent most of her life outside of Korea, first in New York and, latterly, in Umbria. She is an abstract painter, employing a restricted formal language of hard-edged, geometric forms and flattish, although not entirely flat, colour. Her colours are muted. Rather than enlist the intensity of primaries, she prefers a certain earthy density.
Her choice of palette, together with the regular geometry of her forms and the architectonic quality of her pictures, lends her work a mildly retrospective character, evoking art deco and even the Italian "metaphysical" painters.
Chung Eun-Mo: Paintings 1989-2004, which consists of 32 works, is a representative rather than a comprehensive view of her output. The story it tells goes something like this. We begin with shaped canvases, all sorts of irregular geometric shapes and combinations of shapes. These are subdivided within. They are particularly dynamic, well-defined architectural settings, when the surrounding space most effectively frames the individual paintings.
Chung says the irregular format allows her "not to deal with the field, only with the figure, and utilise the space as the field". That is, each painting is figure minus ground, with the surrounding wall becoming part of the painting. There is more, though. With some paintings it is as if we are looking through an opening to a fragment of a composition beyond it. We are on a threshold. Chung plays with this possibility by using colours and tones pitched to invite associations with sky, earth and buildings, but she never represents any of these things.
She then reverts to a standard rectangular format, with irregular figures incorporated within the rectangle - figures against painted grounds. Then the grounds take over, so that the paintings are all ground, all potential space or spaces. The surfaces have a beautiful worn, scraped quality, as though the final layers of colour have a tentative presence, overlying others. But each demarcated area is effectively flat. That changes in the late 1990s, when she introduces subtle gradations of tone within specific areas. These can be so fine that at first you're not sure they're there at all - they could just be an optical effect of juxtaposed colour - but they are there.
Tonal gradation coincides with the appearance of curvilinear forms, something that eventually leads her back to shaped canvases, though this time they take a regular, tondo format. Then, most recently, the circular forms find their way into rectangular canvases, in relatively complex arrangements. Chung generates the same kinds of ambiguities, proposing spaces and symmetries, for example, that she simultaneously undercuts.
In the catalogue Marco Meneguzzo writes about her work mainly in terms of what it is not. One can see his point, but it's not an entirely satisfactory approach. If the paintings occupy a position of uncertainty it's because it's a good place to be, not a mere reluctance to be somewhere else. The spaces in her paintings, for example, are open and fluid rather than fixed and recessive. They are about the flow and interchange of feelings and ideas rather than hierarchical imposition.
Just as she feels the need to constantly challenge her own comfortable familiarity with a particular way of making a painting, so she seems to be wary of any artistic dogma. "I think I'm always conscious when I work about the tendency I might have to make a plane, to achieve a certain colour balance, and there's always an inner debate about whether it's better at this point to break those habits or make a virtue of them, about how far you can take them.
"Abstract painting is about 100 years old now, and I still regard it as a heroic departure. For example, it established that you don't have to be dogmatic about what forms must do, and I think that is a good thing. I'm against dogma in general. After all, look at the trouble it can get us into."
Galway Arts Centre is the city's best conventional exhibition venue, and its adjunct, on Nun's Island, is a fine, almost completely refurbished performance and projection space this year available to Tulca for the first time. The Collegiate Church of St Nicholas is not a conventional venue, but it is effective for Horizon, a collaborative video installation by Aideen Barry and Louise Manifold, centring on two recorded performances, projected simultaneously.
Both generate extraordinary images: Manifold asleep on a bed in a forest, on a sea of fallen leaves, and Barry out on the water, playing a violin as she disappears beneath the waves. The strange, evocative sound of her playing accompanies their twinned explorations of personal horizons in a very effective work.
At Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology's Cluain Mhuire's campus, Deirdre O'Mahony's Bloom begins with photographs of waste discarded in natural settings, printed on a large scale. O'Mahony's previous work has been based on direct impressions of the landscape and its histories, and here she is concerned with the impact of waste and agricultural nutrients on what we tend to view as the natural environment. A series of small paintings of waste are pervaded by a sinister, monochromatic green bloom, an equivalent of the algal bloom of eutrophication, and the algae are used to make a textural grid "landscape", recalling Barrie Cooke's pollution paintings.
In accordance with current thinking, Tulca sites artworks in unorthodox venues as a matter of course. One of the most promising developments in this regard, in Galway as elsewhere, is the presence of art in hospitals. And University College Hospital currently hosts Paul Maye's X-ray images of everyday objects, Beyond Appearance, made with the help of the radiology department; Lorraine Tuck's extremely good photographic documentation of the hospital itself, The Regional; work by Artspace Studios artists; and, apart from Tulca per se, a suite of etchings by Geraldine O'Reilly and a set of Louis le Brocquy's Táin prints.
As well as hosting Enso, live art and performance nights every Saturday, Ard Bia, on Quay Street, is the venue for a strong four-person photographic show with an architectural emphasis. Rosie McGurran's huge, storybook-like portrait of Inishlacken, Beloved, brings a Connemara island to the heart of NUI Galway (although, welcome as it is as one of the partners, surely the university could do more in relation to Tulca than this and the print show in its bunker-like basement gallery).
There is, of course, much more to Tulca than the events covered here. Mick O'Dea's fine show at the Kenny Gallery isn't part of the programme but might as well be: it is well worth seeing. The Norman Villa gallery, with the Lorg printmakers and, from November 18th, sculpture by Tim Morris, is part and parcel. Even Clifden's Atlantic Art Studio is involved. Tulca's programme, widely available, provides comprehensive listings but not, alas, a map to track down some of the venues. That, and accurate opening times, are essentials for future years. But for the moment, Tulca can afford to feel fairly pleased with itself.
Tulca continues throughout Galway until December 4th
