By Gemma Tipton
Eva Rothschild, 'Someone and Someone', 2009, installation view as part of 'Vestibule', Merrion Square, Dublin. Aluminium, enamel paint, 4.5 x 4 m. Courtesy: the artist, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Modern Institute, Glasgow; photograph: Evan Buggle
What is it with Dublin, art and rainbows right now? First it looked like a coincidence: Mark Garry’s ‘Mound II’ (2014), a framed arc of coloured pigments, was ethereal and barely-there at his pleasantly gentle Kerlin Gallery exhibition. This rainbow was echoed in the muted diffuse prisms in Diana Copperwhite’s paintings; paired with canvases by Danny Rolph in a very strong show at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery that balanced the sharper edges of Rolph’s abstraction with Copperwhite’s more dreamy pieces, creating elegant conversations between the two distinct styles of working. But by the time I came upon Eva Rothschild’s ‘Someone and Someone’ (2008), a huge, playful multi-coloured arch, surprising visitors to the normally sedate Merrion Square in the Georgian heart of the city, I began to wonder what was going on.
Mark Garry, Mound II, 2014, powder pigment on gesso, 101 × 72 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Rothschild also has a solo show at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (to give the space its full cumbersome title that no one ever uses), but the Merrion Square piece is part of the ‘Vestibule’ project. Curated by Aoife Tunney, this one-off independent summer event is a fun intervention in which works by Rothschild and Aleana Egan – both large arches – seem to be giving the trees and carefully tended borders something to think about. Rothschild’s in particular tempts you to consider the space it frames as being somehow different: the focus created by the archway intensifies the view within like a picture frame, it beguiles you to walk through into otherness.
‘Vestibule’ is perfect for a public art project aimed at many different groups. That said, the third piece in the installation was kind of irritating. Daniel Gustav Cramer had buried a ball in the park. Obviously you had to take it on trust that he had actually buried the ball, though I’m told it is verifiably there. It’s one thing to persuade Dublin City Council to allow contemporary art into one of its most historic green spaces, over or under ground, it’s quite another to let the public attack it with spades in quest of elusive artworks.
Isabel Nolan, foreground: Nothing new under the sun, 2014; background: “The sky is not bounded by a fixed edge!”: an illuminated rug arranged to accommodate a medieval mind., 2014, installation view at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Courtesy: the artist, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Anyway, back to those rainbows: as we know, there’s been a major recession across the world in recent years and Ireland has suffered more than most. The contemporary art market was flattened, and boom time art euphoria became an almost embarrassing memory. But there’s something on the wind. Things are changing, turning up. The galleries Kerlin, Green on Red, mother’s tankstation and Kevin Kavanagh have been returning from the art fair circuit upbeat and red dots have been appearing at exhibitions in Dublin – in the galleries still retro enough to employ them. Green on Red are also moving, following the end of their lease on Lombard Street, to a new, larger space at Spencer Dock. A gallery upscaling? Unthinkable just two years ago.
So is it something a little biblical? Like the rainbow appearing after the great flood that (almost) destroyed the earth, are these rainbows catching onto a new more optimistic zeitgeist?
Giorgio Griffa, Dalla terra al cielo, 1979, acrylic on canvas,
2.4 × 2.2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; photograph: Jean Vong
At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Isabel Nolan’s solo show ‘The weakening eye of day’ included rainbows, of course, in an exhibition that told a story from the birth of the universe through to the pathos of individual death. Clusters of spheres of plaster and jesmonite in pale pastel shades, The effect of its past and the cause of its future (2014), are sited in one room, while in the next similar forms burst forth to create the colourful constellation of Nothing new under the sun (2014), in which nine ceramic bowls approximating a solar system.
Meandering through to the exhibition’s conclusion, The weakening eye of day (2014) is a huge scrolling loop of steel, overlooked by a vast black and white photograph of a donkey in a graveyard. It’s a gentle and poignant conclusion to the energy of the previous rooms: the cycle of life bringing you to the ultimate end. But wait, walk back through, and you find yourself moving from death to rebirth. Your route offers a choice: pessimism or optimism, it’s all a question of perspective.
There are yet more prisms of colour in Giorgio Griffa’s unstretched canvases hanging on the Douglas Hyde’s walls. And though I thought I’d come to the end of the rainbow at ‘A Modern Panarion; Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin’, a group show at the Hugh Lane, curated by Pádraig E. Moore, there they were again in Bea McMahon’s ‘The Self-Pleasuring Series’ (2014). The occultism in question is seen through the eyes of contemporary artists including, alongside McMahon, Dorje de Burgh, Gunilla Klingberg, Garrett Phelan, Richard Proffitt and a film work by Derek Jarman.
Bea McMahon, Self Pleasuring Series No. 7, 2014, 24 × 33 cm, colouring pencil on paper.
Courtesy: the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin
McMahon’s drawings are edgy pencil sketches, alluding to odd patterns in science and nature, mysterious forces, the pull of physics. Interestingly they echo drawings Nolan showed a couple of years ago at her exhibition at The Model, Sligo, in 2011, and are of a piece with Garry’s current work too: attractive works, easy on the eye and yet with a hinted, and somewhat fey intellectualism that adds both edginess and possibly desirability to the object.
Emerging into the city sunlight, the nagging sense of déjà vu I got from all that occultism, and from McMahon’s series of drawings, revived a stronger memory than that of Nolan’s drawings. I was reminded of being in Massimiliano Gioni’s ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ at last year’s Venice Biennale. There Aleister Crowley, Hilma Af Klint, Emma Kunz, Anna Zemánková, and their colleagues had filled rooms in both the Giardini and the Arsenale with mystical, symbolic and often crazily strange rainbow drawings.
So which is the stronger influence? The trends and whims of the global art world, or a more localised sense of Irish recovery? Whichever it is, in a city whose galleries and public spaces seem suddenly full of rainbows, how can you feel anything but optimistic? On the other hand, too many prisms can pall after a while, and the show of the summer for me is on at the Temple Bar Gallery: Caoimhe Kilfeather’s ‘This attentive place’ is a perfectly judged installation meditating on space, memory, atmosphere and how objects can become animate with inchoate meaning when ideally placed and considered. And not a rainbow in sight.