In today’s world we are constantly swamped by images. Street advertisement is now animated-rhythmically changing from one product to another. Our phones access various apps that allows us to see a myriad of photos taken by people we know and people we don’t laced by images of products that algorithms think we should like. Twenty-four hour news stations beam in real time reports of wars and disasters. Streaming services encourage us to binge watch drama series. We are told to stay connected, stay plugged in, don’t miss out on this pulsing image storm.
Within this swollen flow of images why do some artists persist in pursuing abstraction?
This exhibition assembles a selection of intergenerational artists, from those in their seventies through to middle decades to artists in their late twenties. The selection was made in the rigorous pursuit of abstraction and not the abstracted. Its antecedent lies in Malevich’s geometric severity not Picasso or Braque’s representational based cubism. No artist in this exhibition is trying to depict or represent something. They each are creating work that is self-referential – dealing with shape, colour, geometry, materiality, scale, weight and gravity -more the algebra of seeing than its arithmetic.
Through painting and sculpture In and of Itself presents the work of twenty artists who value this non-representational approach to art making and offers the viewer an opportunity to probe, question and appreciate their courageous endeavours.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Sarah Wren Wilsonis an Irish artist from Monaghan and a current artist in resident at the RHA/IPUT Wilton Park Studios, Dublin. She studied Fine Art at Loughborough University before completing her Fine Art Masters at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland and the Turps Banana Correspondence Course, London.
She has exhibited widely including a solo exhibition at Espacio de Creación Contemporánea Cádiz, Spain and group exhibitions in locations such as Sinchuan Academics Creative Art Museum, China, Bushwick Studios, New York and Royal Scottish Academy, Scotland. Recent activity in 2021-22 includes a professional development residency at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre and solo exhibitions at the Linenhall Art Centre (Sept-Oct 2021) and Royal Hibernian Academy, Ashford Gallery (April 2022). She was one of this year’s shortlisted artists for the RHA Hennessy Craig Award.
Charles Tyrrell was born in Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland, in 1950. He studied painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, graduating in 1974. He lives and works in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula in Co. Cork. Tyrrell is a member of Aosdána, an affiliation of creative artists, established by the Arts Council of Ireland to honour those artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.
Over the last 2 decades, Tyrell has had solo exhibitions in a number of galleries and museums including, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Taylor Galleries, Dublin; Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, RHA, Dublin and Uillin West Cork Arts Centre. Selected group exhibitions include, ‘Take Five’, The Mill, Kinsale, Cork (2017); AIRMAIL, Yanagisawa Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2015); RHA Annual exhibition as an invited artist ons several occasions; and ‘The Moderns’, IMMA, Dublin. Tyrrell represented Ireland in the Paris Biennale in the Museum of Modern Art, Paris in 1982.
Images:
(2) Sarah Wren Wilson, Cross Puropses, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120cm, Image courtesy of the artist.
(3) Charles Tyrrell, Y15.19, 2019, Acrylic on Yupo on Birch ply, 64x45cm, Image courtesy of the artist.