BioTrace - Aoife Shanahan
May
25
to Jul 7

BioTrace - Aoife Shanahan

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Green On Red Gallery

BioTrace

Aoife Shanahan

Solo exhibition

May 25 - Friday July 7, 2023

WHERE

Green On Red Gallery
Park Lane, Spencer Dock
Dublin 1

OPENING HOURS
Monday-Friday : 10am to 6pm
Saturday and Sunday by appointment


Please Click HERE to arrange an appointment

In 2020, Covid-19 spread across the world with devasting effects. The resulting pandemic has not only led to an unprecedented global health and economic crisis, it has significantly changed the way we live. It’s almost incomprehensible that a virus, invisible to the naked eye, can leave its trace in such a significant way.

Micro-organisms are all around us, but their activity mostly goes unnoticed. This work is a series of biograms which attempt to visually represent this on-going activity and make a permanent record of their presence. A piece of film is exposed to a source of bacteria and stored in a cool, dark place for a number of weeks. The bacteria feed on the film’s silver gelatin emulsion, destabilizing it. As the culture grows, it consumes the gelatin as a food source and re-deposits the remaining silver particles into abstract patterns. Eventually the bacteria die and no more changes occurs. The silver trace is all that remains. The film is scanned, a permanent record of their life cycle.

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May
30
to Jul 6

Natalia Black : Musica Universalis, New Paintings

Green On Red Gallery are delighted to launch the first exhibition at the gallery of new paintings by this award-winning, Slovakian-born artist.

Events at the gallery in relation to this exhibition will be announced.

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Screentime
Apr
11
to May 18

Screentime

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Exhibition at Green On Red Gallery of new and recent works by Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel, Alan Butler, Ben Jones, Conor McGarrigle, David O’Reilly and They Are Here.

 

In the space of the 15 years since our VideoTime show in Green On Red Gallery in Dublin where we featured the work exclusively in moving image of Ceal Floyer, Darren Almond, Richard Serra and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, a lot has changed.  The rhythms, cycles and machinations that make the world tick in business, politics and in our daily lives have changed radically, almost unrecognisably, thanks greatly to digital technologies.  The ubiquity of the screen and touch screen platforms of diverse design and application has changed how we relate to each other and has stretched the meaning and the experience of that short four-letter word, time, considerably.

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Nov
30
to Jan 26

Damien Flood: The Figure in the Carpet

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Damien Flood
The Figure in the Carpet 
November 29, 2018 - January 26, 2019

Opening reception November 29, 2018, 6 - 8 pm

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings, The Figure in the Carpet, by Damien Flood and the launch of a new hard-back monograph on the artist of the same title. Flood has marked himself out as one of the most distinctive and original artists of his generation since he first exhibited in the gallery in 2010. Flood's paintings defy easy definition and reward repeated and extended viewing as they slowly yield up their half revealed, half concealed figures and narratives. The eye is led along a dotted line or insistent painted edge before it ends up in a sumptuous thick build-up of paint, of pattern or of nothingness, akin to the floating world of figures and forms in a Francis Bacon. The pressure of the descriptive force is equal to the lack of a clear and easy resolution.

‘ Quickly, however, it became apparent that where meaning came away it came away in coarse and brittle fragments. It became apparent that ‘meaning’ was shards of rockface whose edges never realigned.

The feeling of these shards is the feeling of gums crowded and made sore by too many teeth. ’

The Figure in the Carpet, Damien Flood 'Organelle' by Sue Rainsford, pg 12

The Figure in the Carpet takes it’s title from the book of the same name by Henry James, first published in 1896. Told in the first person; the narrator meets his favourite author and becomes obsessed with discovering the secret meaning or intention of all the author's works. The author informs him that most critics, along with him, have missed the point, his secret ‘like a complex figure in a Persian carpet’. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ has become a short-hand or idiom for the ‘key’ to understanding a writer’s work. Yet the story in which the idiom was born, refuses to open itself up to easy interpretations or analysis. After the story was published Jame’s contemporaries set themselves on a quest for the Figure as an identifiable physical entity. Similarly Damien Flood’s paintings search for an understanding. They form a record of a myriad of thoughts and ideas, piecing together a new world -one that tries to understand the world we live in. This new painted world is not easily discerned, the figure is fleeting and never fully whole.

In ‘Halves’ (2018) the bare linen surface creates a duality between the luscious concentrations of painted fragments and the flesh-like scooped mounds of paint. This work, like many in the show, conjure up the feeling of the artists own unease with the world around him. Where the viewer is set and what rules the artwork follows are up for debate. A draped form balances on a shard of sky, leaning out uneasily toward the viewer. It’s hand curls at the bottom of the canvas, seemingly trapped within the pictorial frame, while the interjecting black stripe pushes through to the canvas wall, dividing the picture plane.

A story about understanding a writers work that people do not fully understand, which in turn, is possibly the key to understanding all of the authors work. The duality within this story is paralleled within Flood’s work. The paintings teeter on the edge of edges, pulling at an image only to let go before it becomes concrete. Ambiguity and understanding are interchangeable, a definitive meaning is not the point. A core interest of Flood’s is how we see and read the world around us. This is mirrored on the canvas through different painterly approaches and the use of illustrative lines. Each approach pushes against the other for pictorial dominance. Flood ́s arrangements of disparate fragments seem to illustrate the futility of illusion, emphasising instead the aspect of painting through multiple stylistic variations, each of these conveying distinct and often conflicting ideas and ideals.

'Flood’s paintings — in some ways like Albini’s attitudes and effects — are questing experiments in achieving such transformative, destabilising encounters. There is ‘rupture’; there are ‘cuts’ and there is a necessary commitment to ‘mutation’. These paintings are the vigorous outcomes of urgent, intense imaginative processes, and the products of a insistently independent artistic spirit.'

The Figure in the Carpet, Damien Flood " Rawness and Rupture: Damien Flood " Declan Long, pg 32

The large scale painting Neighbour (2018) features a Bacon-esque figure twisting through the raw linen picture plane. It’s torso appearing to be cajoled into the space by a shard of sky, almost teasing the figure with the world outside. The picture plane is divided by flat washes of colour over the bare linen. The left blue wash featuring a picture seemingly held in place by a thumb print, creating pictures within pictures. Shimmering yellow ledges hover through the space, framing a painterly rhythm to the work. While in ‘Alcove’ (2018) elements jostle for perspective dominance on a similarly bare linen canvas. Awkwardly painted jars sit uncomfortably at the bottom left of the canvas, destabilising the pictorial depth -the jars contents and purpose unknown. Behind them, thick impasto flesh-like leaves jut out underneath the brown wash wall bringing a depth to the scene while adding to the overall feeling of ritual and happening prevails over the scene.

In the context of the exhibition the title also alludes to the act of seeing imagined forms and shapes in the everyday world around us. Silhouettes of objects creating a figure, intricate designs in a carpet conjuring up far off lands or faces appearing in hedges in low yellowing street light. The arrangements of disparate fragments within Flood’s paintings seem to form a similar function, allowing for multiple readings of new forms and tangential journeys. He uses a mixture of visual languages and motifs comprising of abstract forms, outlines, vases, hands and torso’s that reoccur throughout the work. Whereas some of these motifs bear a figurative semblance that allows for a certain degree of recognition, still others remain exempt from any obvious traceable traits and thus removed from any context. These primarily abstract pictorial marks appear to be puzzle pieces on a plain, floating in a void, loosely recalling a former composition or memory, a patch of paint, or conveying a fleeting impression of reality. They are left for the viewer to complete their narrative or meaning. This is apparent in the large raw linen painting ‘Cabin View’ (2018)(illustrated). In this work twisting twig-like curls of paint lead the eye through the fragmented picture plane. A harlequin patterned vase ornately floats behind the central panel of colour, alluding to a depth within the canvas. The painting teases the viewer with many different visual orientations, interior and exterior merge into a series of movements. The linear elements map out many visual possibilities, heads, arms, mountains, fluctuate within each one of the disparate lines. Everything is permitted but nothing is true.

Artist's talk and events for the exhibition will be announced in early January 2019.

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Oct
19
to Nov 24

Mark Joyce: Solas Salach/Dirty Light

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Mark Joyce's new paintings explore anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience. Improvised compositions on raw linen explore light as a physical entity. The motifs are drawn from scientific and philosophical models, but without that vantage point or privileged field of vision. The works explore the glitches and gaps in our " enlightenment ". With titles such as Dirty Neon ( 2018 ) these paintings reference an urban light, that violent electrical discharge which passes through the aethers to keep out the ancient darkness. Maintaining a tension between surface materiality and pictorial illusion, the relationships between colour, form and ground appear as both established and in a continuous and dissonant flux.

For more information on the artist and his current and past exhibitions do not hesitate to contact the gallery at +353 87 2454282 or at info@greenonredgallery.com or visit us at Green On Red Gallery, Park Lane, Spencer Dock, Dublin 1. Mark's most recent publication Bee Loud Glade Mark Joyce, Yale NUS College, 2015 is also available at the gallery. Mark Joyce's Newtonians ( 2008 ) paintings will be exhibited in the forthcoming Prism exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC, Cork from Friday, November 30, 2018.

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Sep
7
to Oct 13

Tom Hunter: Figures in a Landscape

Green On Red Gallery are proud to bring Tom Hunter's, Figures in a Landscape to Dublin. Join us Friday 7th September, 2018 from 7pm to hear Tom discuss his inspiration and process. Anyone who has heard Tom speak before will know he's a generous orator and it's not to be missed. 

"Figures in a Landscape is a personal odyssey which transports the viewer through a world imbued with myths and legends. On this magical journey, from the hillsides of the West Country to the Marshes of Hackney, the viewer encounters ancient gods, goddesses and mythical monsters which inhabit the landscape and battle for supremacy between the other worlds and the here and now.

This body of work was inspired by Thomas Couture’s Romans during the Decadence(1847) where a scene of debauchery is depicted in the Ancient world with mortals and immortals inhabiting the same domain. The figures and forms painted in this scene seamlessly transform between statues, humans and ancient gods allowing the spectator to float between Earth, Hades and Mount Olympus. Taking this concept into my own ancient English landscape I have created a series of works which interweave childhood memories with contemporary experiences. The figures that inhabit these images shift between statue, mythical forms and people, transporting us through time and space, connecting us to ancient worlds, half-remembered myths and magical encounters. 

My voyage starts in the Dorset village where I grew up, hearing tales of drunken revelry with couples gathering for May Day to fornicate beneath the naked male giant of CerneAbbas to imbue fertility on body and field. As I move through the landscape I have encountered many other figures and forms, sometimes as dream-like glimpses from the back of my parents’Morris Traveller, others from train windows as I flash through the countryside. These ancient megalithic chalk figures straddle the hilltops and map out the landscape as the constellations map out the night skies. They look down upon the mortals, nymphs and Poseidon in his underwater grotto and waterways. Intermingled with these are childhood memories of visiting Crystal Palace where monsters rise from the primordial swamp and gateways to Hades invite us on a Victorian version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 

These childhood fictions and myths interweave with references to my home in Hackney. Memories of balmy summer evenings spent swimming with lovers in luminous pools dissolve between myths of Lugus, the ancient Celtic God of the River Lea. This vision comes to an end at Winterville, where the mid-winter solstice pagan festival becomes distorted in an Olympian mountain top landscape. Here ancient and contemporary narratives clash and shatter into a dystopian consumerist nightmare."
- Tom Hunter, June 2018

Image: Tom Hunter, Cerne Abbas Giant 2018, Silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 in -40.6 x 50.8 cm Ed. of 7 

Image: Tom Hunter, Cerne Abbas Giant 2018, Silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 in -40.6 x 50.8 cm Ed. of 7 

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Jun
28
to Aug 17

New Beginnings

June 28th - August 4th, 2018
Wine and canapés reception : Thursday, 28 June, 6-8pm

Kirstin Arndt 
Alan Butler
Damien Flood
Caroline McCarthy
Emma Roche
Nigel Rolfe
Aoife Shanahan
Xavier Theunis

Green On Red Gallery
 is pleased to announce its next exhibition New Beginnings opening at the gallery on Thursday, June 28, 6-8pm. All welcome. The exhibition will continue until August 17, 2018.

The exhibition includes new work by gallery artists and artists showing in the gallery for the first time, including the work of Xavier Theunis, Emma Roche and Aoife Shanahan along with gallery artists Damien FloodNigel Rolfe, Caroline McCarthy and Alan Butler.

Further announcements will follow in relation to events in the gallery to coincide with the New Beginnings exhibition including a new performance by Nigel Rolfe. 

Nigel Rolfe , Dark Pool, Prussian blue and ivory black pigment and lard on Fabriano paper , 2018

Nigel Rolfe , Dark Pool, Prussian blue and ivory black pigment and lard on Fabriano paper , 2018

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Apr
13
to Jun 2

Ramon Kassam: Study for a Studio by the Sea

April 13th – June 2nd, 2018
Reception: Thursday 12th April, 2018, 6 – 8pm

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to present Study for a studio by the Sea, the second solo exhibition of new works by Irish artist Ramon Kassam in the Spencer Dock gallery.  In this exhibition of new paintings the artist continues to make works that reflect on the physical, social and art historical conditions of their own creation with inventiveness and humour.  The fiction of the artist grappling with his subject, even his career, in his studio is fleshed out in these ambitious paintings and diptychs.  The canvases are physically and visually layered, at times confusing real space with depicted space in large colourful expanses.

Study for a Studio by the Sea takes its name from one of the central works in the show. The large-scale painting depicts an artist’s desire to actively engage with, fantasise about and shape their environment through studio activity and painting. This work and the other paintings on show are an extension of Kassam’s ongoing project to develop a world in which to cite an artist. As a result, reoccurring themes and motifs related to landscape are present throughout this series of paintings. 

The universe he is creating on the 2D pictorial surface of his canvases are spaces the artist can enter into/onto. This imaginary escape route out of his own studio reality allows Kassam to intuitively indulge his appetite to invent the places, narratives and processes from which his paintings draw. 

Moving between first person and third person points of view and from one painting to the next, scenes and activities simulated in works for this exhibition include:  painting a not-too-distant Nearest Town ( 2018 );  a painting of a distant and desirable destination in Tropical Strokes ( 2018 ); and, you could say, a desperate fantasy of the artist to relocate to the coast played out in Study for a Studio by the Sea ( 2018 ).

The aesthetic of these paintings and Kassam’s practice in general is strongly influenced by his enthusiasm for modernist painting languages. The abbreviated content in his compositions can appear flattened or stretched, and emerge from combining hard-edge blocks of form, colour and imagery. In some works canvases are combined and incorporate collage. At times minimal and at times gestural, his paintings can blur in and out of legible imagery and pure abstraction. 

In a gesture that further complicates and extends the dialogue in Study for a studio by the Sea, the exhibition generously includes two additional paintings to Kassam’s own, one each by painters Fiona Burke and Seán Guinan, studio peers and friends of the artist. Both works employ comparable visual languages to Kassam's and make reference to landscape. Presenting them together in his show, Kassam re-casts the paintings as those of his bitter rivals in the painting landscape of his expanding, invented universe. 

As always, the processes and concepts on show are intended to provide multiple readings of the work, but ultimately aim to connect to painting’s visual tradition, and the physical and psychological landscape of the real world.

Special events organised during the run of this exhibition will be announced.

Ramon Kassam is an artist from Limerick City, Ireland.  Painting forms the basis of his practice. Kassam’s recent work re-connects with the concept of the artist as creative subject, combining the thematic of the artist's workspace ( canvas, studio, gallery and urban environment ) with formal and conceptual references to the autonomous reality of modernist abstraction.

Ramon is a graduate of the Limerick School of Art and Design and has been exhibiting regularly since 2013. Exhibitions include: The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan (USA), The Green On Red Gallery - Dublin (Solo), The Lewis Glucksman Gallery - Cork, Limerick City Gallery of Art (2015 Solo), and EVA International Ireland's Biennale, Limerick (2014).

He has received a number of awards and residencies. These include The 16 x 16: Next Generation Bursary Award, a special initiative of the Arts Council and the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme, in recognition of the role of artists in the events of 1916. Residencies include The Embassy of Ireland in Addis Ababa - Project Residency, The RHA Tony O’ Malley Residency Award and Irish Museum of Modern Art. In addition to his practice Kassam founded and was a Director of both Wickham Street Studios, an artist studio complex and Occupy Space, a visual arts exhibition space in Limerick City from 2009-2011.

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Feb
22
to Mar 31

Kirstin Arndt: Tight corners Loose Lines

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to present the first solo show in the gallery and in Ireland by Kirstin Arndt (b. Germany, 1961) called Tight corners Loose lines.

Arndt brings to her mixture of sharp and flowing industrial materials a predilection for clean and colourful forms, at times inviting the viewer to interact with or even to recompose her work. Her sculptures, made from a wide variety of readily available industrial materials, fold, bend, fall or crease in space depending on the support or the effects of gravity on her limp or resistant forms.

She has previously exhibited with Green On Red Gallery in Material Pleasures, in 2004 and Future, 2017.

Ralf Christofori has written how Arndt has a very keen sense of the aesthetic in everyday things. She searches for and finds her materials among common or garden building supplies – shielding fleece, barrier tape, plastic containers, shower curtains, and the like. And throughout this the Düsseldorf artist references the historical sources of Concrete Art. Kirstin Arndt does not simply present the materials she uses, they are as it were “re-informed” by her: She releases the things from their original functional contexts, gives them form, and lends them a new purpose. In her untitled piece from 2007, she has taken industrially manufactured truck tarpaulins, complete with their functional hooks and eyes, and hung them on the wall. Quite profane, but composed most exactly to produce a charged effect. A tarpaulin coated in matt silver in the shape of a square hangs directly on the wall; to the right the silver gives way to a shiny green, thus loosening up the feeling of a two-dimensional
panel painting. Kirstin Arndt manages to approach found objects with a heightened sensitivity and attention, as both an artist and a beholder. The silver tarpaulin advances to become a monochrome picture surface, the green tarpaulin is fixed in such a way that its right-hand side evokes a Baroque arrangement of folds. In this way the work literally evolves an inner dynamism that does not simply distract our gaze on second sight from perceiving a mere “thing in itself”. The effect is astonishing – not least because this art undermines the
viewer’s expectations by the simplest of means. This is clearly one of the great visual or aesthetic strengths in Kirstin Arndt’s works. But the true consequence of this piece only reveals itself once one leaves the perceptual level in order to bring to mind the artistic concept behind it. The artist draws on the underpinnings of Concrete Art and transgresses them by taking them literally and enriching them by a clever marriage with the concept of the readymade. That this marriage may truly be made in heaven and not of the shotgun variety is revealed impressively in Kirstin Arndt’s works. RC


Hommage an das Quadrat,2009, . p. 70/71, Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany. (Translated from German.)

Kirstin Arndt is represented in Germany by Galerie Gisela Clement, Bonn, Galerie and Galerie Kim Behm, Frankfurt.

For more information please see Kirstin Arndt & Green On Red Gallery.

o.T. (untitled), 2009, PVC tarpaulin, water blue (218 x 218 cm), aluminum, polished (300 x 5 x 2 cm), 235 x 290 x 2 cm,Image: Kirstin Arndt

o.T. (untitled), 2009, PVC tarpaulin, water blue (218 x 218 cm), aluminum, polished (300 x 5 x 2 cm), 235 x 290 x 2 cm,

Image: Kirstin Arndt

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Dec
15
to Feb 3

Future – Christmas Show 2017

Future
Eleven artists.  New Work.  New artists.


Opening Reception :
Thursday, 14 December, 6-8pm, 2017



Exhibition Dates :
15 December, 2017 – 3 February, 2018

The Gallery will close for Christmas Holidays at 3pm, Saturday, December 23, 2017.  Normal hours will resume on Wednesday 3rd January, 2018.  

Kirstin Arndt, o.T., (flyer/rectangle), 2006, Anodized aluminium, 68 x 42 x 35cms and 65 x 50 x 45cms

Kirstin Arndto.T., (flyer/rectangle), 2006, Anodized aluminium, 68 x 42 x 35cms and 65 x 50 x 45cms

Green On Red Gallery presents Futurea group exhibition featuring works from gallery and invited artists. New work by artists Kirstin Arndt ( D ), Alan ButlerJohn CroninDamien FloodBenjamin Houlihan ( D ),  Mark JoyceArno Kramer ( N )Fergus MartinNiamh McCannCaroline McCarthy and Nigel Rolfe will dominate.

Kristin Arndt will show for the second time in the gallery with her newest sculptural and wall works from her Düsseldorf studio.  Arndt brings to her mixture of sharp and flowing industrial materials a prediliction for clean and colourful forms, at times inviting the viewer to interact with or even to recompose her work.  She last exhibited in Green On Red Gallery in Material Pleasures curated by Molly Sullivan in 2004.

Alan Butler continues to delve into a virtual computer-generated space with dazzling, hypnotic results to make works that pose searching questions about man's tinkering with technology and nature.  His new deskscapes jump off the page as do his new deep blue Virtual Botany cyanotypes.

John Cronin's first canvas paintings Warme Nights, Fat Grounde, Softe Dewes, And Misty Mornings ( 2017 ) will be on display.

Damien Flood's new paintings on canvas and linen show the artist's trademark play with memory and half narrative.  The viewer is caught in this world of fragments and silhouettes where a teasing but elegantly curving line will, when you least expect it, exude in a lush protrusion or a thumbprint.  Not to mention the baroque pirourette of his anti-gesture.

Mark Joyce will show new small acrylic paintings on raw linen.  His startling palette of colours borrowed from nature are somewhere between image and a rainbow of marks. 

Arno Kramer, High Winds Move Slowly, charcoal, pencil, watercolour on plaster, Courtesy The Artist and The Model, Sligo, 2017

Arno KramerHigh Winds Move Slowly, charcoal, pencil, watercolour on plaster, Courtesy The Artist and The Model, Sligo, 2017

Arno Kramer will exhibit new mixed media drawings on paper that place images, animals and birds from nature in testing, abstract compositions.  They appear innocent witnesses to looming and surrounding forces, caught in a maelstrom of dark webs and pools, words and lines.  Kramer is one of the leading artists working in drawing in Europe today.  Arno is the founder and curator of The Drawing Centre, Diepenheim, the Netherlands.

Fergus Martin's two pastel paintings on paper are the earliest and possibly the largest works in the exhibition.  These Untitled paintings carry many of the artist's recognisable and singular, uncompromising traits where edge and extent and the hand-made are pushed to a bold and meticulous limit.

Another artist who pushes his chosen material to surprising limits is Benjamin Houlihan, showing for the first time in Green On Red Gallery.  No matter what his material, Houlihan manages to find an expressive charge that is hard to match or to contain.  His sanded sculptures are finely balanced on a line verging on the impossible.

Niamh McCann also considers nature pitted against culture.  The resulting works in ceramic, fired clay, porcelain, wood, gold leaf, bronze and pure pigment are rich in association and steeped in Modernist history, albeit an alternative history.

Caroline McCarthy's Ground Work ( 2017 ) and Walk me to the station ( 2017 ) paintings are her latest achievements in acrylic, unbelievably, on canvas.  Caroline's next solo show will be in Green On Red Gallery in 2018.

In Nigel Rolfe's new 'Dark was the night cold was the ground'  works on paper he uses Chinese blood ink and ivory black pure pigment to dramatic and energetic effect.

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Oct
28
to Dec 9

John Cronin: Warme Nights, Sweete Dewes, Fat Grounde and Misty Mornings

The Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce John Cronin’s exhibition of new paintings Warme Nights, Fat Grounde, Sweete Dewes, And Misty Mornings. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition since his very successful solo shows in VOLTA New York in March 2017 and his first solo survey exhibition, ZXX, in the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery, Dublin 2, in 2016.

In an exciting departure for the artist Warme Nights, Fat Grounde,… sees the artist paint in oil on the softer surface of canvas and, in so doing, avails of the fabric’s warp and weft with more sonorous results. Momentary glimpses of the textured panel beneath abruptly concede to fronts of Cronin’s best painting. He makes full use of the possibilities of soaking, bleeding and leaking in the movement of the paint, dragged and scraped across the smaller more intimate panels.

The move away from the sheer, sharp aluminium surface and a palette more consistent with the computer age, seems in sympathy with a shift to darker hues and a more reflective mood. Cronin says :

When I started mulling over “Warm Nights, Sweete Dewes, Fat Grounde, And Misty Mornings” my preoccupations were with Loss in the modern world, loss of time, privacy, identity and sense of reality. Unfortunately, personal loss suffocated these thoughts and “Warm Nights, Sweete Dewes, Fat Grounde, And Misty Mornings”became a different beast.

…Sometimes a softly spoken word has more effect.

Warme Nights, Fat Grounde, Sweete Dewes, And Misty Mornings is the 16th C. description of the ideal time to harvest saffron, an action that is achievable by the human hand alone.


John Cronin: Warme Nights, Sweete Dewes, Fat Grounde, And Misty Mornings  2017  Oil on Canvas 41 x 61cms

John Cronin: Warme Nights, Sweete Dewes, Fat Grounde, And Misty Mornings  2017  Oil on Canvas 41 x 61cms

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Oct
12
5:00 PM17:00

Breathing Out Breathing In

Performance works by:
Jade Blackstock
Paula Fitzsimons
Alice Jacobs
Eunjung Kim
Matt Mahony Page
Nigel Rolfe

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to invite you to Breathing Out Breathing In, new performance works realised by Jade Blackstock, Paula Fitzsimons, Alice Jacobs, Eunjung Kim, Matt Mahony Page and Nigel Rolfe to coincide with Rolfe’s solo show, BREATH, at Green On Red Gallery until the new closing date of October 21, 2017.

Works made live in their moment of doing.

The current and contemporary performance subject is represented here by artists drawn from cultural diversity and widespread geographies. Works that question identity and the political with materials and the body as site. Disturbing and drawing in space, actions that risk and challenge not only themselves but also their audience.

Eunjung Kim

Eunjung Kim

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Sep
14
to Oct 21

Nigel Rolfe: Breath

Breathe – Nine points of dissonance ( Hide in dark corners )
Performance : Thursday 14 September at 7pm

The Green On Red Gallery is excited to announce Breath, the eighth solo exhibition in the gallery of new works by the artist Nigel Rolfe.

B R E A T H

Breathing Out – Breathing In
Breathe Freedom

A set of relational works made recently in 2017
About inside and outside
Insides and outsides
How the world outside enters us
How we seek to be and where to belong
Where in the world
Caught for breath

In Performance making
The agency of being and doing most often has four representations:

Firstly the body as site is the instrument for actions.
This located in place and across time.

Its afterlife which are perhaps threefold:

The residue of what is left in material terms, traces and remains and deposits.

Then the captured document as the photographic or filmic record – holding and marking – archiving moments of time.

Then possibly the most significant, the memory of the transient or
ephemeral images made directly in the moment . What resonates and is retained of animated and changing passing pictures – the somehow caught in between.

Take breath, breathe: actions-drawings-photographs

Nigel Rolfe is recognised among the leading artists working currently in performance, a subject he helped establish and define from his first ” sculptures in motion ” in 1969.

He moved to Dublin in the early ’70s and from here he developed and fine-tuned his practice inside and outside galleries and museums and in festivals and biennale across 5 continents. He has developed a solid reputation not only as a leading performance artist but as an activist, teacher, curator and scholar.
He has been presenting works consistently in many counties for more than forty years.

On the occasion of the opening of Breath on Thursday, September 14 next, the artist will perform a new work Breathe – Nine points of dissonance ( Hide in dark corners ) in the gallery at 7pm.

Nigel Rolfe: Breath 3, colour photographic giclée print, edition 5, 2017

Nigel Rolfe: Breath 3, colour photographic giclée print, edition 5, 2017

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May
25
to Jul 22

Painting NOW

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of Painting NOW, an exhibition of work in two dimensions by artists from the gallery including John Cronin, Mary FitzGerald, Damien Flood, Mark Joyce, Ramon Kassam, Fergus Martin, Niamh McCann, Caroline McCarthy & Nigel Rolfe.

In Painting NOW the diversity of approaches is brought startlingly to light. Different materials on different surfaces show how paintings can inhabit the architecture with variety and ingenuity.

Ramon Kassam‘s Gallery ( 2015 ) suggests space continuing beyond the canvas and wrapping around itself as if a deep fracture has caused time and the narrative to hiccup. The rupture is even more severe and ambiguous in New Pose ( 2017 ) where any effort to take in a single view must yield to multiple readings at once.

Niamh McCann‘s Kavalier and Clay evokes themes of flight, escape, adventure and persecution found in the original tale of this fictional duo, authored by Michael Chabon, against the backdrop of the harrowing, brutal facts of 20th century Europe. Some tales will just never die. They seem embedded in the human condition. Lady with Nose ( 2016) aims wryly at the same self-destructive streak.

There is a disappearing act of sorts in Canthus ( 2017 ) by Mary FitzGerald whose practice has increasingly placed the onus on and handed control to the viewer. In her recent solo – and anonymous – show at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, her rain-soaked view of the West of Ireland contrasted in more ways than were immediately obvious with the watercolour versions in the same room. Distant views and memories competed with mirror images of the surrounding museum architecture. Past pitted against Present.

In Damien Flood‘s new paintings luscious marks hang tantalisingly free and unanchored in the neutral or infinite ground of the bare linen support like never before. Damien’s work seems to evolve with an increasing mastery of understatement and punch at the same time.

Another artist who, for more personal reasons, chooses to paint on raw linen is Mark Joyce. In his Ballyconnell Colours – After Dermot Healy ( 2017 ), 140 x 110cms, the soaked colours and rough surfaces work together towards an image of an immensely physical light.

For the second time in the new gallery Nigel Rolfe shows paintings on paper that physically record and extend the live action of this world-renowned performance artist. His painting materials include animal lard, natural dry pigment, charcoal and paint flicked, dragged and pummelled across the surface. They have a metaphorical as much as an aesthetic function in provocative works that convey moving and perplexing messages.

During the opening reception at the gallery on Thursday, May 25, Nigel Rolfe will make a live performance.

New paintings in Painting NOW by John Cronin, Fergus Martin and Caroline McCarthy relish the medium while fundamentally questioning it. The challenge is to get beneath the surface.

Niamh McCann: Kavalier and Clay (2015) [ detail : one half of wall painting ] Watercolour paint, acrylic paint, pencil, charcoal, gold leaf, dimensions variable, according to site.

Niamh McCann: Kavalier and Clay (2015) [ detail : one half of wall painting ] Watercolour paint, acrylic paint, pencil, charcoal, gold leaf, dimensions variable, according to site.

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Mar
9
to May 13

Alan Butler: HELIOSYNTH

HELIOSYNTH is the artist’s first exhibition in a commercial gallery and comes at the end of a plethora of exhibitions and curated online shows in Ireland and internationally from Belgrade to Skibereen. Butler has garnered a reputation for being one of the most insightful and inventive artists whose “raw material” is the virtual. His use of digital simulacra has unexpected, ravishing and perplexing philosophic results and is as close to the pioneering technologies of the early 19th century daguerreotype and cyanotype as it is to the silicon technology in your pocket and on your desk.

The exhibition will include new, unique monumental works on paper, digital photograms, new sculpture and video works. He has released a small preview of a feline walk through the history of art on Mars to Beethoven’s ‘Piano Sonata no. 14 in C#m’ as follows: https://youtu.be/fcOsKj_P0FI.This work itself is the first outing of a custom video game simulation, which will be further developed over the next year.

A feature of this show are the large-scale wall works which fall under two categories, painting and print. The former, a number of works from a series called Deskscapes are light-fast pigment paint on archival cotton, and re-imagine popular desktop wallpapers as psychedelic abstractions. The latter are from a series of deep-matte lambda prints ( a hybrid digital/analog photographic process ) which use forensic analysation software to remove the photographic components from smartphone wallpaper imagery, leaving behind only the digital scarring of the jpeg-saving process.

HELIOSYNTH is a fake word. A construct combining two extremes of interest to the artist and perfectly captured in his own cyanotypes. Using this 19th century photographic technique, light-sensitive Fabriano paper is exposed to the writing effects of the sun to “ grow “ stunning plant forms which have been extracted from video games files. These works formally reference seminal works by Anna Atkins from the mid-1800s. However, instead of the legend in Latin, each boasts its own digital filename in bold script below.

Butler’s work is such that you are made to question your grasp of the world around you, itself in the grip of systems of knowledge and coding that is never far away from the override or delete button. He is an artist concerned at the most fundamental level with the art of mimesis and representation holding a poignant mirror up to humanity and its hurtle forward powerfully captured in “ON EXACTITUDE IN SCIENCE”, in which the artist has produced a shot-for-shot remake of the 1983 motion picture ‘KOYAANISQATSI’, commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art for its forthcoming curated exhibition Above and Below, also in April.

Alan Butler 'Heliosynth' Installation 01.jpg
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Dec
1
to Jan 21

Ronan McCrea MATERIAL(s)

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce its third solo exhibition of new work by Ronan McCrea opening on Thursday, 1st December 2016 and running until to 21st January 2017. 

MATERIAL(s) is an installation of projected 16mm film-works and photography, bringing together recurrent concerns in McCrea’s diverse artistic practice.  These include investigations into the appropriated and found image, celluloid materiality, reproduction and indexicality, artistic and personal genealogies and the institutions and processes of pedagogy.

The starting point for this body of work is a collection of instructional 16mm films on mechanical engineering produced by the BBC in 1972.  Its scope covers educational documentaries on other topics, including a film about the sculptor Henry Moore.  All were salvaged by the artist from a college engineering department in the wake of film's obsolesce as a didactic tool.

Through a laborious process of cutting and splicing of this found material, McCrea draws on tropes taken from avant-garde Structural film - also from the 1970s - from the Cut-Up and from the procedures of early Conceptual art, re-constituting the fragments into new formations, with new affinities.  The resultant works, which are material objects as much as images, stage the apparatus of projection, looping and spectatorship in response to the scale and raw interior of the gallery’s architecture.  

Ronan McCrea (b. 1969, Dublin) is an artist working with photography, moving image, architecture and social space. He has been making exhibitions and projects in galleries, museums and public contexts for over twenty years. 

Selected exhibitions and projects include We Are Center, CSS Bard College New York (2016); Medium (Corporate Entities) 2008/15 in Fragments, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2015); Venn/Chroma Enclave Gallery, London (2014); Exiles, Lab Gallery Dublin (2013); solo exhibitions at Green on Red Gallery (2013 & 2011); Autodidact screenings at Cologne Kunstverein and Cobra Museum, Netherlands (2011);  School Play a public art commission for a CETNS school in Dublin (2009);  We are Grammar, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, (2011); School Days, Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2010-11); Sinopale 3, Sinop Biennial, Turkey (2010); Coalesce: Happenstance, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2009); Nameless Science, Apexart, New York (2008); Ireland at the Venice,  52nd Venice  Biennale (2005);  general-specific  Project Arts Centre (2003);  Seminal Glassbox Paris (2002).  His work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, UCD, OPW, as well as numerous private collections. McCrea is a lecturer in Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).   

mccrea.jpg
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Oct
19
to Nov 26

Damien Flood: A Root that Turns as the Sun Turns

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of new paintings, A Root that Turns as the Sun Turns, opening next Thursday, October 20, 2016, 5-8.30pm.  In this, the artist’s 4th solo show with the gallery, Flood proves his considerable worth as a thinker and as an artist of real ability, capable of weaving new narratives that intrigue and draw the viewer.   The bare ground in each of his paintings is, at once, provocative metaphor and stage hosting existential marks, lines, encrustations, erasures and endless non-sequiters in a vast - or is it microscopic ? - universe riddled with phantoms of this painted world caught between figure and abstraction, between memory and projection.
 
If the palette in this exhibition seems muted and understated it is because it is, notwithstanding the flash of blood-red here or verdant green there.  This, it seems, is Flood at his most contemplative and mannerist.  Curved and whipping lines, painted excesses, soft edges appear according to their own logic and need but are, at the same time, orchestrated with poise.

A Root That Turns As The Sun Turns is a descriptive quote from Rafaello Magiotti describing Kircher’s Sunflower clock to Galileo who was imprisoned at the time for his scientific research proposing heliocentricism (the belief that the Sun is at the centre of our solar system).  The Sunflower clock was believed to be a heliotropic plant, a nightshade whose seeds allegedly followed the motions of the sun when affixed to a cork bobbing in water. Nicolas Claude de Peiresc a patron of Kircher believed that this plant could prove heliocentricism, which Galileo had failed to prove with his theory of the tides in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Throughout Kircher’s life and with persistent requests from Peiresc this Sunflower clock was never seen. Along with Kircher’s own beautiful illustrations of it only second hand reports can be found leading a lot of scholars of the time to question his legitimacy. This did not deter his wider world following choosing to believe in his unseen wonders of the world.
 
The work for A Root That Turns As The Sun Turns is not centred around this ‘root’ but the notions of belief, faith and seeing, that the story entails. These mainly large scale works reflect on how belief in something unseen can change our view of the world.  Art is often a self portrait, even if it is at times unintentional. These new paintings mirror a fracturing of the artists own beliefs, a stripping away of a childhood naiveté and a re-navigation of the world around him as the artist reflects on the passing of his Mother.  Some works have a feeling of limbo and loss while others are celebratory in rhythm and tone. 
 
In the large scale painting Shadow and Pear, shapes jostle for form, trying to connect to the viewers' world, endeavouring to appear coherent and readable. On the left of the canvas a Pear sits on a golden ledge, it’s shadow marooned on it’s own crimson island to the right. A swooping curved arm loops down from this island, reaching out in a gestural offering. The painting has a narrative of play and balance between the shapes and tones, everything hinging on the blue piercing object in the centre.
 
Parting, a large grey slab-like painting, is one of the most visceral of the show. Paint is applied like lumps of flesh preened straight from the body. These chunks hover and float around each other lost in memory of what they were. The shadows cast on the left of the canvas suggest a solidity to the form, hinting at its previous life.
 
Seemingly unrelated sparse lines and translucent shapes make up the painting Family. They reflect and rhythmically mimic each other. Slowly these outlines reveal figures turning and shifting, enveloping each other. The painting Staregazes out of the canvas at the viewer, peering deep into them. Looking for what lies underneath, below the skin, questioningly reflecting its fleshy appearance back at the audience.
 
These paintings are about our relationships, not only to the world, but to each other. They endeavour to peel back the layers of the everyday to produce a psychological reflection of an unseen world.
 
The artist will participate in a formal conversation with friend and art writer James Merrigan on Saturday, November 26 at 1.15pm in the gallery and will host a Listening Party of music that influenced and inspired the work, on Sunday, November 27 at 2pm as part of Dublin Gallery Weekend, 2016.  


View Event →
Sep
8
to Oct 15

Fergus Martin: New Works

Opening Reception : Thursday, 8th September, 2016, 6-8pm

Marine, submarine, the sky, the earth.

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Fergus Martin on Thursday, September 8, 2016.  

An award-winning artist, known for his work in painting, sculpture and photography, he was awarded the Irish American Cultural Institute O'Malley Art Award in 2014.

His public sculptures in stainless steel and the playful plastic Pipe Dreams series are typical of the focus and directness of his work. This spareness and intensity is seen in his photographs Table ( 2006 ), A Chair ( 2014 ), A Tree ( 2013 ).

This latest show at Green On Red Gallery comes out of a need to work with colour and form. Striking examples of these are his Untitled prints, made with Stoney Road Press in 2015/2016, new large chalk pastel works on paper and new paintings on aluminium box panels.

The forms are strict, pared down but full of restlessness and depth.  He speaks of filling with colour, rather than reducing.  The painting, Sky, points heavenwards, while others are rooted in the ground.

Fergus Martin will give a talk on Culture Night, September 16th, at 7pm to discuss his show.

More on Fergus Martin at www.fergusmartin.com and at www.stoneyroadpress.com/artists/fergus-martin

L-R: Yellow, Marine, Blue, Earth

L-R: Yellow, Marine, Blue, Earth

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Jul
14
to Aug 26

Summertime

John Cronin
Niamh McCann
Ramon Kassam
Mark Joyce
Caroline McCarthy
Damien Flood


14 Jul - 26 Aug 2016

Green on Red Gallery are excited to announce the opening of their new exhibition 'Summertime'.

An opening reception will take place Thursday, 4th August, 18.00 - 20.00 hrs.  

Summertime includes new works by a number of gallery artists including ZXX  (2016) by John CroninLady with nose in sight (2015) by Niamh McCann,  Eyeing Drawings taped to a window with a great Limerick sky Ramon Kassam and more works by Mark Joyce, Caroline McCarthy and Damien Flood.

Damien Flood, Dressing Room (2016)
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May
19
to Jul 2

Ramon Kassam: Works

Ramon Kassam Works

Opening Reception : Thursday, 19th May 2016, 18:00-20:00


Green On Red Gallery
Park Lane 
Spencer Dock, Dublin 1.

New Work, 2016, acrylic, inkjet prints, stretcher bar, plastic & staples on linen, 213x180cm

New Work, 2016, acrylic, inkjet prints, stretcher bar, plastic & staples on linen, 213x180cm

Ramon Kassam Works
Opening Reception Thursday 19th May 2016
18:00 - 20:00

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of Works,  a solo exhibition of new works by first time exhibitor, Ramon Kassam. Kassam’s paintings combine the thematic of the artist's workspace (canvas, studio and urban environment) with formal and conceptual references to the autonomous reality of modernist abstraction. In his new series of paintings at The Green on Red Gallery, Kassam continues to develop invented narratives that centre around an artist’s supposed activities, environment and viewpoints. The works in this exhibition have a particular focus on the creative output (works) of his hypothetical practitioner.
 
Because Ireland is an island, perhaps there was, or still is, the potential for forms of painting to emerge that are particularly endemic to the here, like Ireland as a sort of Galápagos Islands model for painting. Maybe the proliferation of landscape in Irish painting, or the murals in Northern Ireland are cases for that, forms of painting that emerged as a result of our particular conditions. Those forms of Painting could be viewed as an act of repossession, a land grab or reclaiming of territory through the medium. Kassam’s approach in recent work to imagine a semi fictional world to site an artist in, is an ongoing project and an attempt to create his own conditions for the emergence of potential practice and narratives.
 
The paintings in ‘Works’ depict subjects and narratives usually situated in or around an artist’s studio or urban environment. Painting in the third person, Kassam plays out and proposes potential artistic activity that emerges from these worlds. These include an artist designing and displaying a flag for his practice (Study for his flag & A flag for his practice), exhibiting new works (New works), and a depiction of fictional lost work (Slide jpg - lost early work). The aesthetic of these and Kassam’s other work is influenced by the painted fabric of the Irish urban environment and his appreciation for modernist abstracted painterly language. Blocks of colour and form are haphazardly combined to create visual arrangements and narratives. Canvases are often cropped, flipped, glued, and can incorporate various studio materials such as tape, photographs, paper, wood, tacks, etc. These processes and concepts on show are intended to provide multiple readings of the work, but ultimately aim to connect to painting’s visual tradition, and the physical and psychological landscape of Kassam’s real world.

A conversation with the artist in the gallery will be announced in June.

For further information please contact Jerome O Drisceoil

View Event →
Dec
17
to Feb 20

New Works

New Works at Green On Red Gallery Spencer Dock, Dublin 1

Fergus Martin.jpg

New Works 
Group Exhibition 

17th December 2015 - 20th February 2016

Green On Red are excited to announce the opening of their next exhibition, New Works. 
 
The exhibition with including works from gallery artists John Cronin, Mary FitzGerald, Damien Flood, Arno Kramer, Fergus Martin, Niamh McCann, Caroline McCarthy, Ronan McCrea, Bridget Riley, and Nigel Rolfe, with contributing artist Ramon Kassam.
 
An opening reception will take place on December 17th, 2015, 17:30-20:30. Mulled wine and mince pies will be served on this festive evening.
 
The Gallery will be closed from December 23, 2015 to January 5th, 2016. Normal Hours will resume on January 6th, 2016.


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Nov
13
to Dec 12

Mary FitzGerald: STILL

STILL
Mary FitzGerald

November 13 - December 12, 2015

Opening Reception : Thursday 12th November 6 - 8 pm

Green On Red Gallery, Park Lane, Spencer Dock, Dublin 1.

still mfg1.jpg

STILL
Mary FitzGerald

12 November - 12 December 2015

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to welcome STILL, an exhibition of new work by Mary FitzGerald. Like her previous solo show in the gallery, HALFLIFE in 2012, it is an exhibition of uncompromising ambition, combining large-scale installation with individual, smaller works.

STILL addresses the new gallery and the architecture of Park Lane like no exhibition previously. Through a number of basic alterations to the gallery layout and further interventions the viewer is entered into an all-embracing and qualitatively new encounter with time and space.

Mirrors and mirror images had the effect of distorting the architecture on a smaller scale in works by the artist like Self-portrait with spine (2014), photo-collage on mirror, in the inaugural group exhibition, Renew, in Spencer Dock in December, 2014. These self-portrait mirror wall works were completely dependent on the live moment and the presence of the viewer. When the viewer disconnected, moved on to the next work, something necessary and live ceased as decisively and abruptly as a scene change. These self-portraits also had the effect, from a distance, of puncturing the architecture while at the same time reflecting and capturing it. When you moved so did the reflecting voids.

Similar disruptions and constructions operate in STILL. As you enter cameras are rolling. The encounter is “on".

The gallery has been turned around and FitzGerald uses and explores corners and hidden spaces in the large new premises as opportunities for enhanced dialogue and replay. Subject becomes object and consciousness becomes self-consciousness through a loop not out of place in post-structuralist film. The aim here is to draw the viewer’s attention to ways of being in the world. The idea of passage is central – and appeared in the previous exhibition. Passage is also a core principal in Shintoism, made up of "spirit" and "to" or action. For this reason thresholds appear and reappear in STILL where each space in the gallery has been marked and constructed to suggest different realms and different layers of reality. Still mirror “paintings“ stand sentry as you step through incense towards the gallery’s patio. They echo the inhaling and exhaling kami in Shinto temples. One painting delicately holds a barely discernible x suspended between its four corners while its opposite contains an equally fragile “in“.

No surface is dormant or inactive. The gallery’s new furniture glows increasingly with a vivid pink fluorescence the more the room darkens repeating the balancing act between opposite forces that are held in vertiginous tension throughout STILL.

The artist’s series of new Still paintings are boxed and/or mirrored mixed media works with depictions or assemblages of interior worlds caught in real time with the most minimal of means.

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Aug
27
to Oct 24

Nigel Rolfe: The Burning Frame

The Burning Frame
Nigel Rolfe

August 27 - October 24, 2015

Reception : Thursday 27th August 6 - 8 pm

Live Performance by the artist on Friday 11th September at 8pm

Green On Red Gallery, Park Lane, Spencer Dock, Dublin 1.

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the forthcoming exhibition The Burning Frame by gallery artist Nigel Rolfe, his first solo exhibition in the new Spencer Dock gallery.

The artist first exhibited in the gallery in 1994 and has been the subject of 7 solo exhibitions since in Green On Red Gallery. The show will consist of a new performance, new and old photographic works and, for the first time, pure pigment drawings by the artist.
 
Rolfe’s presence on the international biennale and performance circuit is virtually unmatched.  Rolfe has maintained his position and reputation as one of the most significant performance artists working anywhere, in our time.  His output has remained vital and charged with biting reference to recent and contemporary socio- and geo-political events.  The shooting dead of a female looter in Haiti with a framed painting in her hand is just one such sad and tragic example. 
 
The artist’s minimal and austere language is all the more profound and potent in its employment of raw and essential elements.  Flour is used to draw, Gutai-like, with his body or to explode into images of delicate but threatening dust.  Rope, eviscerated fish, buckets, gold leaf and, in his 2010 exhibition in the gallery, Prussian Blue pigment, an extract of Cyanide, expand his vocabulary in biting and radical commentary on double standards - and the resulting human catastrophe - in the West. There is no moral high ground here but a radical commitment always to question and to interrogate.  In live works like Red the act of creation is laid bare in unpredictable and poetic intensity.  The work is transient. The work is of the moment.  The work is now. 
 
To watch Rolfe perform flat on the floor or walking the street or submerged in the watery bogs of Kildare or of Antietam, Virginia (USA), in the Arctic Circle or the Gwangju or Venice Biennale is to view an artist enact and weave poetry that is urgently connected to that place. It is no accident that the emblematic, solitary images of heads, hands, and objects in the associated haunting photographs touch a deep chord.  
 
The exhibition will open to the public on August 28, 2015 and run until October 24, 2015.
 
As part of the first Dublin Gallery Weekend, Rolfe will be perform a new work titled Red at Green On Red Gallery on Friday 11th September at 8pm. This event is free and all are welcome to attend.  Booking essential.

Further events in the gallery to coincide with this exhibition will be announced on social media and on the gallery website.

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Jun
18
to Jul 18

Caroline McCarthy: USELESS

USELESS
Caroline McCarthy 

June 18 until August 8, 2015

mcmcuseless.jpg

In this provocatively titled exhibition, Caroline McCarthy questions the increasing demand on art to justify itself in terms of economic or social outcomes by suggesting art as an activity that has value in its freedom to have no 'use' at all. 

Deliberately working from source material that has a functional value, McCarthy detaches it from that function, and reconstitutes it within a discourse emerging from an engagement with art practice, one in which the problems of representation, illusion, abstraction and transformation play a central role. 

Her paintings on show here draw on adhesive tape commonly found in DIY stores. Meticulously painted, these works present an illusionistic melee of different tapes with reference to trompe l‘oeil still life. At the same time, rendering in paint allows the usual practical associations of their colour coding to be extended into a visual language that takes on the wider concerns and associations of the medium. We may be aware that the chemical make-up of the material used to effect the illusion is similar to that of the tape depicted, as if the object referent has been dissolved and remade to appear outwardly the same, albeit now operating with and within altered relations. 

A comparable transformation took place to the screwdriver that was to become the model for the work Useless, after which this exhibition has been named. Bent through its failure to meet the expected requirements of a screwdriver (opening a tin) it turned into something else, something that had, for McCarthy, a quality of its own; a right to exist in its own terms. In casting and replicating this object by hand hundreds of times over like a bent-screwdriver production line, McCarthy makes an emphatic endorsement of that right.

Broken shoelaces, rusty nails, old paint pots have also undergone transformations, ones which in turn serve to both amplify and celebrate their uselessness. There is purpose here and it is a purpose that is bound up with the process of making, meaning and conjecture.

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May
15
to Jun 11

Light Falls

Light Falls
Liadin Cooke
Marcia Hafif
Mark Joyce
Sofie Loscher
Scott Lyall
Bridget Riley  

Opening receptions on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May, 2015, 6-8pm

Exhibition runs from 15th May - 11th June
Gallery open : 10am - 6 pm ( Wednesday - Friday ) and 11am - 3 pm ( Saturday ) 

Marcia Hafif  Shade 2,  2013,  oil on canvas, 6 parts ( each  46 x 46 cms ) 

Marcia Hafif  Shade 2,  2013,  oil on canvas, 6 parts ( each  46 x 46 cms ) 

Light Falls alludes to the thinking behind the next exhibition at Green On Red Gallery.  Light is a subject that has concerned artists not confined to the short list presented here.  The new gallery is surrounded by walls of daylight on 3 sides and enjoys dramatic, light-filled views of a changing part of the city.  How light inhabits the scene is a source of constant attraction and play.  

The list of artists pitched here against this backdrop includes a broad church of artists from different generations and working in a variety of media.  All artists address the idea and the physics of natural light - or harness its movement - in specific ways.
 

Marcia Hafif, who is the subject of a number of solo exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. in May and June this year, shows in the gallery for the second time in 20 years. Hafif's monochromatic matte Shade series of oil paintings absorb light with their carefully hand-painted soft canvas surfaces.  The individual planes of rich colour project from the wall on the deep stretchers, seeming to hover in space. 

Bridget Riley's eloquent description of an early experience of natural light has been a touchstone for her as an artist and is brought into play here in Light Falls in her gouache 4th Revision of May, Bassacs.  She recounts :

Swimming through the oval, saucer-like reflections, dipping and flashing on the sea surface, one traced the colours back to the origins of those reflections . . . The entire elusive, unstable, flickering complex subject to the changing qualities of the light itself. On a fine day, for instance, all was bespattered with the glitter of bright sunlight and its tiny pinpoints of virtually black shadow - it was as though one was swimming through a diamond.

The dynamic interaction of line, colour and form in her paintings is echoed, three dimensionally, in Sofie Loscher's shimmering new sculptural work in wood and polaroid.  She is showing in the gallery for the first time.  

Scott Lyall's Eve prints take a single colour pixel and mathematically adjust it through an algorithm, resulting in large prints which are highly dependent on the lighting conditions in which they are shown.  He says 'The Eve's  . . . , like Platonic forms, can circulate in cyberspace at will, awaiting their moment of local incarnation.'
 

Liadin Cooke's delicate organic " Stacks " of water and colour convey a sense of the subtle and elusive quality of light itself.  She states "it struck me that I needed to look at the basic things in my life".  Cooke subsequently translated ' ordinary ' objects into the fundamental elements of form and colour. 

Mark Joyce will deliver a talk in the gallery in June to coincide with his participation in the exhibition. His work, which explores the anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience fit perfectly into this exhibition.

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Feb
19
to Mar 28

Tom Hunter: Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay

Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay solo exhibition by Tom Hunter

February 19 - March 2015
Opens Thursday, February 19, 6-8pm

Inner Circle  2013  C-type print  Edition of 4  76.2 x 96.5cms

Inner Circle  2013  C-type print  Edition of 4  76.2 x 96.5cms

The Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of Tom Hunter’s fourth solo exhibition, Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay, at the Spencer Dock gallery on Thursday, February 19, 6-8pm.  The show consists of two separate bodies of work, one made in the last 2 years in the artist’s native England, the other made while on the Artist’s Residency Programme in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006. 
 
Tom Hunter is perhaps best known for his alluring and beautifully composed images of the marginal in society, specifically in the neighbourhood of Hackney, East London, home to the artist for the last 20-30 years.  Hunter’s honest depiction of life in the bars, the streets and halls of Hackney, far from being voyeuristic, reveals the drama and the dignity of ordinary lives.  What is special about these varied scenes of seedy or borderland London is how they wear the garment and authority of art history.  Each photograph references a painting in the collection of the National Gallery, London and, more generally, the artist’s deep admiration for the quiet, mysterious interiors of Johannes Vermeer’s 17th C. Delft, for example.
 
Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay are produced in a medium size and photographed using a large-format, pin-hole camera.  They are as close as the artist has come to shooting pure, romantic landscape subjects.  Nature is seen at its most exposed and elemental, possibly at dawn.   The pin-hole camera, like a “ heavenly portal “ lends a drama and distortion that magnifies the subject and lifts it out of the ordinary.  The bending horizon, the even grey Dublin light, the pull of the ample sea, the bursting pink light on the English horizon gives both series a timeless and ageless dimension.  Heaven and earth are joined in these images in a cosmological declaration.
 
The mark of man, however, is evident even central to the story of these works.  The menhirs are testament to a prehistoric civilisation about which little is known for fact except, on the evidence of its surviving monolithic architecture, that it clung predominately to north Western Europe and parts of North Africa.  It is easily imagined as a time of giants, great legends and heroic battles.  As a child the artist walked the ancient roads leading to these focal points in the land.  But the artist’s more immediate predecessors here are the communities of travellers, revellers and revivalists with their own rites and heroics.    
 
Later, as I started walking this landscape, the hill forts of Hambledon Hill, Hod Hill, Badbury Rings and Spetisbury Rings took me back to an imagined world of Asterix and Obelix fighting great battles of independence and liberation.
 
As a teenager in the late Seventies the tribalism and eccentricity in England seemed to explode, with hundreds of bikers roaring through our village on a Bank holiday, like a huge invading army of Goths, to the Mods, Skinheads and my new adopted brethren the Punks. Some of these tribes were drawn to the Stonehenge Free Festival.
 
( Tom Hunter )
 
The hand bars, on the other hand, at Sandycove and Seapoint remind us of the invisible community of open water swimmers and another monumental, epic journey which begins with the following description :
 
Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
A new art colour for our Irish poets : snotgreen.  You can almost taste it, can’t you ?
He mounted the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.
- God, he said quietly.  Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it : a grey sweet mother ?  The Snotgreen sea.  The scrotumtightening sea.  Epi oinopa ponton.  Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks.  I must teach you.  You must read them in the original.  Thalatta !  Thalatta !.  She is our great sweet mother.  Come and look.
 
                                                                                                            ( Ulysses, James Joyce )
 
Journey is the leitmotif for Tom's work as an artist.  His journey, of course, is more an internal one.
 
Tom continues to exhibit internationally and has recently exhibited at the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York, Scandinavia, elsewhere in Europe and in China.  In 2015 he will take up a commission to complete a project during a residency in Jordan on the life of Laurence of Arabia, a fellow-Dorset man.
 
The artist will give a talk on his work on March 6th, 1-2pm in the Green On Red Gallery in Spencer Dock.  Free.  Booking advisable.  On March 12th Donal Curtin, Senior Partner, BCK Chartered Accountants and Chairman of the Board of Chambers Ireland will give a talk in the gallery on The Art of Collecting at 6pm.  All welcome.

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Dec
12
to Jan 31

Renew

Renew at Green On Red Gallery Spencer Dock, Dublin 1

Opening Reception: Thurs 11 December, 6 - 9pm
Exhibition Dates: 12 Dec - 31 Jan 2015

Gerard Byrne
John Cronin

Mary FitzGerald
Damien Flood
Mark Joyce
Niamh McCann
Caroline McCarthy
Ronan McCrea
Alice Maher
Bridget Riley

markjoyce.jpg

The Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the reopening of the gallery in Spencer Dock, Dublin 1 ( 150m north of Spencer Dock Luas stop ) on December 11, 2014 with Renew, an exhibition of new work by gallery artists Gerard ByrneJohn CroninMary FitzGeraldDamien FloodMark JoyceNiamh McCannCaroline McCarthyRonan McCreaAlice Maher and Bridget Riley.  Renew will be the first exhibition in the new gallery and continues until the end of January 2015.  

Renew will feature a new suite of 9 prints by Alice Maher shown here for the first time. These are the first new works by the artist seen since her highly successful solo exhibition, Becoming, in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2012 and her recently published monograph, Resevoir, published in 2014 by ROAD Publications, Dublin.  The new works are marked by a riot of colour and play with motifs of corporeal and symbolic metamorphosis.  In God's little helper the female protagonist is overcome with a coat of human hair, as Magdalene was before ( or after ? ) her.

Gerard Byrne's new Kodak Wratten Filter Systems unique photographs come as close in photography to abstraction as is possible due to the lighting and arrangement of the single colour, century-long, glass filters.  Byrne's approach to the medium regularly makes poetic and witty side-references to the history of painting, theatre and photography itself.  The result here recalls minimalist ideas of reduction and repetition and a solipsistic pragmatism.

Mark Joyce presents two new paintings on panel that recall some of his earlier '90's oil on canvas paintings.  Their playful shapes echo letters and numbers but never spell out their message, as a Mel Bochner might.

Damien Flood's new paintings are stripped back with a fresh and exciting economy.  They hang on a knife-edge between bringing us to familiar and mysterious, unknown worlds.

Mary FitzGerald uses hard-edge and fragile materials that make the most of their reflective qualities and expand the moment of perception.  The viewer is involved and engaged in unexpected twists and turns.

In anticipation of her forthcoming solo show at the gallery, Caroline McCarthy presents Woods in November ( 2014 ) acrylic on canvas.  This is a dazzling trompe l'oeil rendition of the most inconsequential subject brought centre stage.  We are made to question our own belief systems and moral code in an upside-down world so convincingly portrayed.

Ronan McCrea will exhibit new photographs from his " reprographic " project that meditates on current questions about the fin de siécle, as he sees it, of the photographic era in late or post Post-Modernism.  These works have an authority borrowed from the conventions of the medium but can point to new conclusions.

Large Fragment by Bridget Riley has an undeniable elegance and mastery that, while harking back to the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, is both fresh and compelling.

The Gallery will open to the public from Wednesday-Friday10-6pm and on Saturdays 11-3pm.

We look forward to welcoming you to the new gallery and to Renew.  Bí linn.

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May
22
to Jun 28

Bea McMahon: Plot

Bea McMahon | Plot | 22 May - 28 June 2014

Bea McMahon | Plot.jpg

Opening Reception: Thurs 22 May, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
(Green On Red Gallery: 6:00 - 8:00 pm; Unit 4, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1: 7:00 - 9:00 pm)
Exhibition Dates: 22 May - 28 June 2014


Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new work by Bea McMahon on Thursday, May 22, 2014.

The opening reception will span two venues: Green On Red Gallery (Lombard Street) from 6-8 pm and Unit 4, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1 from 7-9 pm. 

The passage of the idea in the visual arts is coextensive with the showing of a material form with a contour. In McMahon’s new works the gallery space becomes the site of translation or metaphor or legislative definition, the traces left by enacting/uttering a fixed text on the spatial sets become the material that drives a plot or plot matrix. 

The Green on Red will hold the props and plot drawings in the Lombard Street Gallery while a moving image workThe Fixed Point2014, a play uttered for the props, will be set across the water in Unit 4, James Joyce Street. 

A notion of intrigue and the audience’s ability to make identifications generated byplot, leave traces or shudders that manifest themselves in the physical realm.

The shudder McMahon refers to is to match the force of a spoken text with the theatricality of political language, economic language and the language of desire which enters the real and the active. Our democratic ideals rest on giving politicians’ uttered speech the mandate to become action. For a person to use the language of both the sophist (written) and politician (action) is almost impossible. In this work the artist wants to drive the legislative power of naming with its qualities of fluidity, craftiness, honour, fixity, rudeness, and insistence to the point of absurdity. 

Alain Badiou prophesises that theatre is heading towards an austere mathematics. As a political instrument it is also bound to the state – as an art it will always be a site divided between subversion and institution, contemplative passivity and active rupture– a complex ordering system.

The artist will develop some of these ideasIn Conversationwith Jaki Irvine in the Lombard Street East gallery on Saturday, May 24th at 1.30pm. All welcome.

Please note, the exhibition will continue only in Unit 4, James Joyce Street from Tuesday May 27th until June 28th next.  The props and plot drawings in Lombard Street are on view for one week only.

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Apr
10
to May 17

Fergus Martin: Outside Inside

Fergus Martin / Outside Inside /

10 April – 17 May 2014

I wanted to do something with the calm and storms of the outside and inside.

The Dearest Thing Ever Made, Stop, Storms, A Chair, A Tree. The images are poignant for me, as if they had a kind of sweet strangeness.

A Tree, 2013, Edition of 3, Archival pigment print, 159 x 106cms

A Tree, 2013, Edition of 3, Archival pigment print, 159 x 106cms

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new photographic and sculptural work by Fergus Martin on Thursday, April 10, 2014.

Martin's work is executed with extreme rigour and control but is ardently expressive. Underneath the cool, pristine surfaces is a torrent of ideas and emotions, a distillation of everyday experience.

His ability to convey power through images of a chair or table is a moving part of his work.

Stop and The Dearest Thing Ever Made are two free-standing steel works in the exhibition. These pieces are expressive punctuation marks playing with scale and silence and command the space along with a mysterious steel box of storms, a haunting tree and a startling chair.

Storms, 2014, Steel box with sound, mp3 player, speaker, 25 x 42 x 10cms, 20mins

Storms, 2014, Steel box with sound, mp3 player, speaker, 25 x 42 x 10cms, 20mins

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Jan
16
to Feb 22

Damien Flood: Interior Sun

Damien Flood: Interior Sun

Opening Reception: Thurs 16 Jan, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Exhibition Dates: 16 Jan - 22 Feb 2014

Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new work, Interior Sun, by Irish artist Damien Flood on Thursday, January 16, 2014. 
 
In this body of work called Interior Sun the artist continues to intrigue and surprise with paintings that rely heavily on the quality and the direction and the brevity of the painted line, among other things.  The same line varies between having descriptive, diagrammatic or even ideogrammatic powers in a witty and confident turn to an increasingly light touch.  It also does not add up or conclude.  Reminiscent of an earlier work called Red Line, paintings like Pipe and String charm the viewer with their whimsical and contradictory logic. 
 
Repeatedly his compositions defy easy legibility.  They hover, in fact, on the lip of being gauche or failing outright.  The tension is sharpened by the lack of definition or clear description.  Space is inchoate and ambiguous, a fact which only asserts and intensifies the experience of the painted surface.  Flood invents a manner of painting and composing that is out on its own.  To say that it is a new abstraction that is not hidebound is an understatement.  Look at the jostle of marks and strokes and lines in Slouch or how littleBather, as a title, tells us about the “ scene “ depicted.  There is no scene.  A presence is the most generous description of what is held in suspension between two flag-like, typically muted and mustard-coloured flat panels, one above, one below, both flying from the same black line or pole.  
 
It has been said that : “ These works challenge how the viewer is placed within the psychological space of the painting. Interchanging notions of placement, i.e grounded, floating, underground, viewing from inner-consciousness to outer-consciousness to outer space displace the viewer and instil an otherworldly mood within them. “
 
Flood marries abstraction with representation, elegant phrases with mute absence, meaning with nonsense, questions with more questions. Colour is utilized in both harmony and discord, the image can be tantalizingly comprehensible and frustratingly unreadable. As viewers we are pitched into a gladiatorial arena where the techniques of painting insist on their own importance while supporting their ability to offer fictional depiction. It is testament to the fluency and multilingualism of Flood’s skill that in successive bodies of work he is able to keep the field of engagement so open.  ( Patrick Murphy, Director, RHA )
 
The palette remains predominately earthen and dun with occasional flourescent accents of turquoise or vivid pink.  Each mark feels more daring and honest and increasingly independent or other-worldly.  There is an unpredictability and courage here that is nerve-tingling and alive.
 
For an expansion of these ideas and more information you may attend a conversation between the artist and James Merrigan in Green On Red Gallery on 12 February in the gallery at 7pm.  Flood’s work has recently been exhibited in curated exhibitions in the Arthur Boskamp Foundation, Germany, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, Domo Baal Gallery, London.

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