THE Famine Exhibition the very imaginative initiative of the George Moore Society which has its base in Claremorris, was originally scheduled to go to America over a year ago, but complications and difficulties have postponed this. The large "group" exhibition has in fact been seen already in Claremorris, but in a make-shift venue for only a short period, and presumably by a relatively limited number of viewers; so the Ormeau Baths is more or less its public baptism.
However, the two upstairs galleries of the Belfast venue were not large enough to hold it all, so what is on view there is a selection - a large selection, in fact the guts or kernel of the whole promotion except that there are only a few pieces of sculpture, three to be precise. The roll-call of names is still highly impressive: Le Brocquy, O'Malley, Blackshaw, Barrie Cooke, etc. and plainly Irish art is present in strength.
The Famine Exhibition is of course, a "thematic" one, but the various artists were left to their own imaginative and formal resources and have not been under pressure to spell things out. This means, in effect, that the individual works are there on their own, self-contained merits and do not illustrate an overall thesis - as frequently happens in contemporary conceptualist exhibitions. There is, in short, no obvious "programme nor would the exhibitors have let themselves be tied down to one.
There seems to have been no restriction on scale, which allows for a number of big, arresting works to act as cornerstones or standing pillars of the whole enterprise. One of the most notable is Charles Tyrrell's big painting A Spade, A Spade which is virtually a triptych with a "cross" motif in the central "panel" and the heads of two real-life spades added at the lower corners. It is a direct, powerful, yet slightly mysterious work which speaks with an emotional force Tyrrell rarely allows himself. Sharon O'Malley's equally big and complex The Leveller is closer to a kind of personal symbolism (of death?); it is a dense, dreamlike, slightly surreal composition which, unfortunately, suffers from being hung in an area where the lighting does not do it justice.
Hughie O'Donoghue's On Our Knees is closer to abstraction, though the big kneeling figure half-emerges into focus through ominous mists of paint. I was frankly disappointed by Patrick Graham's Grey Area, which seems precisely that and no more (one is judging this painter by the highest standards, be it understood). Basil Blackshaw, with eloquent simplicity, merely paints two oversize potato shapes with expressionist freedom and a maximum impact;
John Shinnors inhabits his usual shadowy world dominated by black and white.
Louis Le Brocquy does not allude to the Famine, even elliptically; instead he contributes some large, mistily searching watercolour "portraits" of George Moore, - whose family were landlords in one of the worst-hit areas of Mayo.
However, this review is not a catalogue; so characterful works by Michael Mulcahy, Barrie Cooke, Tony O'Malley, Sean McSweeney, Brian Bourke, William Crozier, Veronica Bolay, Anne Madden, Paki Smith etc etc can only be mentioned briefly. However with the floor space (as opposed to wall space) which was available, it seems rather strange to have included so little sculpture. Conor Fallon's stark, haunting multiple piece in steel and iron (three holed black pots or cauldrons surmounted by crows) dominates the space around it, but otherwise there are only two smallish, quite conventional works by John Colt. In the Claremorris "preview", I had already formed the impression that the exhibition as a whole was stronger in painting and graphics than in sculpture.
