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.