Shuffle

The RHA Ashford Gallery is delighted to announce a new exhibition of paintings by Richard Gorman RHA. This exhibition, entitled Shuffle, has been on tour throughout 2009, starting in the Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery, Drogheda in July 2009 and then showing at the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, in October 2009.
Gorman’s oil paintings, on linen, typically involve clearly defined interrelated blocks of colour, creating tensions between themselves and the edge of the picture. ‘He has a distinctive colour sense, one inclined towards a muted, classical palette shot through with flashes of brightness that belong to a different tonal scale entirely….. expanses of zinging hues: lemons and acid yellows, lime greens and salmon pinks. They dance against the sombre greys and browns’. (Aidan Dunne, Irish Times)
Gorman says of this new work: “The paintings I am making at the moment explore the interrelationships with overlapping flat shapes and in turn those relationships with the edge of the picture plane. The oil paint is applied quite flatly on to gessoed linen canvas.” April 2009.
Gorman was educated in Ireland but has lived and worked in Milan since the 1980s. Throughout the 90s, his naturally understated gifts as a colourist became more evident. Since then his work has drawn much of its power from the compositional tension between increasingly prominent and boldly simplified, irregular blocks of colour. Gorman has exhibited widely since the mid-1980s, in Dublin, London, Milan and Tokyo. Frequent and extended visits to Japan have notably influenced his working methods and materials. Recent international exhibitions have included solo shows at Itami City Gallery of Art and Mitaka City Art Foundation in Japan and the Koriyama Museum, Japan. Gorman has also, over the past few years, participated in group shows at Der Spiegel Galerie, Cologne; an exhibition of contemporary Irish drawings, A Measured Quietude, which toured the Berkeley Art Museum, California and The Drawing Center, New York; He is represented in many collections, both public and private in Europe, the UK, Ireland and Japan.
Shuffle was originally co-commissioned by Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery, Drogheda and Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown in 2009
Selection of images from the exhibition
Richard Gorman RHA, Snug Shuffle, 2009, oil on linen, 170 x 170 cm, Image courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.