The arranged marriages between artists and their patrons was the key to proceedings this week. It was all about relationships in the art world. It was time to celebrate.
Port Sunlight, an exhibition by Caroline McCarthy at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, had won the AIB Prize, an annual award for artists of promise. Her show is about the "collective longing to live in fiction", she says.
Artists Stephen Brandes, Gerard Byrne, Taffina Flood, James O'Nolan and Ronan McCrea were all in attendance.
Vaari Claffey, the gallery's curator, and Marian Lovett, the new director of Temple Bar & Studios, were both present to welcome the visitors. The exhibition runs until Saturday, July 6th.
Then there was great excitement later in the week, when guests gathered for a gala evening at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, to hear who in the business world had been choosen as winners in the Allianz Business2Arts Sponsorship of the Year awards. Eagle Star won a judges' special recognition award for its sponsorship of the Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape exhibition at the Millennium Wing of the National Gallery.
The best first-time sponsor was Project Management Group for its sponsorship of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery's Picasso exhibition in Cork.
Meanwhile at another glitzy function earlier in the week, Nissan Ireland, announced its four-year sponsorship of visual arts at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Gerard O'Toole, executive chairman of Nissan Ireland, says it is intended to give four painters in their mid-years the opportunity to exhibit a collection of their work.
Three of the artists were present to celebrate the news. They were Barrie Cooke, who now resides in Kilmactranny, Co Sligo; Martin Gale on the Wicklow border and John Noel Smith, who has been based in Berlin for the past 22 years but is about to move back to Co Wexford with his family. The fourth artist, Stephen McKenna, has just returned from Spain and was unable to attend.
The first show, featuring Smith's work, opens in the gallery in September.