Martin & Hobbs is a unique collaborative project between the painter Fergus Martin and the photographer Anthony Hobbs. This collaboration developed out of their first work together, Martin¹s 2001 solo exhibition at Green On Red Gallery, in which he exhibited a series of lambda print self-portraits which Hobbs had digitally manipulated. My Paradise is Now is their second exhibition together, and their first in Ireland. In April 2003, to significant critical acclaim, they showed My Paradise is Here at The Oratorio di San Ludovico in Venice.

sMartin & Hobbs have collaborated to bring together their experience as a painter and as a photographer. This exhibition will include a frieze which the artists have loosely based on figures from an Assumption by Rosso Fiorentino (1494 - 1540). Specifically, Martin & Hobbs¹s project came out of a desire by both artists to explore new ways of experiencing the human figure as a living entity. Both artists were attracted to the physical quality of the pictures. Thus the work was realised photographically in order to attain the extraordinary level of detail and clarity necessary to create the illusion of reality. The images are not manipulated, yet Martin & Hobbs have created images which breathe and constantly shift in focus.

All of the works in this show are of Martin¹s figure clothed in white - suggesting an almost ascetic and trance-like state - and assuming various poses. The images do not consciously form a narrative sequence but instead come from Martin & Hobbs¹s interest in Renaissance painting and in the nature and texture of skin and fabric. The figures, though natural and unmediated, appear staged as tableaux. Their gestures and postures are representative of states of being. The scale of the photographs and the simplicity and sparseness of the images position the viewer so that he or she is actively engaged in the physicality of looking while simultaneously becoming all the more conscious of their own states of Œbeing¹ within the gallery¹s space,

Fergus Martin had a solo exhibition, Pipe Dreams, at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny in June/July 2003, and he took part in the Festival of Contemporary Art, L¹art d¹être au monde, held in Melle, France in July/August 2003.

Anthony Hobbs took part in the RHA Annual Exhibition in June 2003, and was a participant in the Culture 2000 ŒDigital Surface¹ project which resulted in a presentation of the work at Tate Britain in June 2003

Martin & Hobbs will give a Gallery Talk on Wednesday 22nd of October at 6.30 p.m. Please email or phone the Gallery to reserve a seat.

This September Green On Red Gallery will open an exhibition of new prints by John Graham. Reconfigure is the artist¹s fifth solo show with the Gallery. 2003 has been an active one for Graham who has exhibited in solo shows in the Hitsuji Gallery, Niigata and Amaneya Gallery, Fukuoka, Japan and in Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast. He has had two two-person exhibitions; one with Richard Gorman at the Yanagisawa Gallery, Tokyo and the other with the Japanese calligrapher Teisi Maesaki at Acros Gallery in Fukuoka. Graham has also collaborated with Dominic Stevens Architects on a building project which received Special Mention in the AAI Awards 2003.

For this show, the artist has made carborundum prints and etchings. The new work embodies and extends familiar themes the centrality of drawing, and a system of mark-making, allied to ideas of repetition and chance in design.

My work is essentially drawing. The act of drawing and the print processes through which it occurs inform each other in various ways. Printmaking is laborious. I¹m interested in the contradiction between a certain felicity and lightness that I am trying to achieve and the often painstaking and technically complex methods of achieving it.

The etchings are mostly diptychs. Separate plates are printed together to form couples. These Œcouples¹ are not envisaged beforehand but only come about after many individual elements are made. "The drawing is fairly schematic accumulations of lines, loops and scribbles, the repetition of familiar motifs. Composition comes mainly through the alignment of separate elements to form relationships."

The larger carborundum prints are simpler in form. The artist likens them to animation. "Drawings change. The print is an arrested moment in an ongoing activity, like a still from an animation sequence. It is a kind of confirmation of the drawing¹s state at a particular time the Œproof¹ of its existence." The lightness of these works is in their mood as much as in their visual clarity, combining qualities of austere elegance and playful animation.

'No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.'
( Robert Melville, The New Statesman, 1970 ) *

To coincide with Bridget Riley's major retrospective at Tate Britain in London this summer, the Green On Red Gallery will open an exhibition of Riley's work in Dublin beginning the 27th of June. The Gallery will exhibit and have for sale a broad range of this iconic artist's work which spans her career from the 1970's to 2003 and includes painting, prints**, gouaches and fine studies. This exhibition will run for two months.

Riley's work has not been seen in Ireland since her last solo exhibition in the Green On Red Gallery in 1997. Since that time she has had landmark exhibitions in Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; The Serpentine Gallery, London; The Dia Centre for the Arts, New York; The Kunsthalle, Berne; The Kunstverein, Dusseldorf; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld and now, in Tate Britain, London.

Riley is one of the original inventors of Op Art***. In the 1960's she painted what are the now famous dizzying black and white, geometric paintings. Since then she has engaged in a highly logical and systematic progression of thought and experimentation using variations on the use of line and colour and colour-as -form like no-one before her…except, that is, when echoes of some of the great masters of European art [and art historical movements] resound in her practice. Most recently and perhaps most obviously, Matisse's cut-outs are beautifully evoked in the combination of crisp curved shapes and clear Mediterranean colours in works like Echo (1998) and Evoë (2000). Her admiration for Egyptian art and design is evident in works like Ra (1981) and Blue Quiver (1983). Forty years on, in her large new mural paintings Riley has dramatically returned to the 'circle motifs' where comparisons with Islamic art and design are, perhaps, apt.

In all instances, Bridget Riley continues to dazzle. She produces highly complex and resolved paintings in a masterful display of richly interwoven lozenge, arc, swerving half-moon and other invented shapes. The result is increasingly harmonic compositions that shift, shimmer and dance as you view them.

A feature of Riley's current paintings is without doubt the fact that even in the first moment of one's looking each has its own 'key', which is utterly non-conceptual. And ultimately the dual resonance of her most recent works ( a term which applies equally to colours and sounds ) encourages the viewer to respond to their musicality.

(" Bridget Riley and the performance of colour, " : Martin Hentschel in Bridget Riley New Work : Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, 2002 )

* The Melville quote appears in the Tate Britain press release for Bridget Riley's exhibition.
** See : Bridget Riley Complete Prints 1962 - 2001; Ridinghouse and The Hayward Gallery, London, 2002.
*** This term was first used in MoMA, New York, 1965 to describe geometric abstract art which exploits perceptual ambiguity and marginal optical devices to create the appearance of vibrating, pulsating, shivering, hallucinatory movement.

This will be Paul Mosse's second solo exhibition at Green On Red Gallery. The title of this exhibition refers to his continuing fascination with and use of painterly and real space (here sandwiched in the picture plane.) Mosse's paintings have always challenged our expectations about the medium of paint In this latest show, Mosse once more exhibits very physical constructions of paint, layered with sawdust, matchsticks, glue, acrylic, sand and plywood among other materials. Mosse had admitted that, "I like the tension between control and anarchy - everything almost falling apart - but still held together by a bigger system…. "

Of art-making, Mosse has said "I like the slow-process based approach to work. I hope my work may be more like a 'slow-release' pill than the more recent trend for 'sound-bite art'. I like it to keep on giving off things over the years…." His work is intensely constructed from detailed drawings which are then used to create stencils. He uses these as a basis from which to begin his constructions, which are painstakingly worked and reworked, often for months and in some cases, years on end. He often finds that it is the paintings themselves that announce when they are ready to leave the studio. Mosse's work celebrates chance and mystery as much as discipline and focus. This is evident in the dual influences Mosse acknowledges, namely, his love/hate relationship with the large-scale painting constructions of Frank Stella and the importance of his beloved Kilkenny landscapes and of nature itself. This exhibition will also include several smaller works which will give the viewer the opportunity to experience a more intimate body of work alongside his signature larger-scale pieces.

The acclaimed avant-garde composer/violnist duo Barry Guy and Maya Homburger will give a concert entitled Celebration at the Gallery on Friday, 13th June from 7:00 p.m. Please phone the Gallery to reserve seating.

In this, Alice Maher's fourth solo exhibition with Green On Red Gallery, the artist continues her investigations into different media and materials through this imaginative new series of photographic work. Using Renaissance portraiture as a reference and herself as the subject, Maher has staged eleven singular and often startling tableaux. Found materials are used, not to make sculpture, but to extend, transform and transgress her own body. These self-portraits are no hymns to feminine beauty. They are images invested with a terrible and profound knowledge of the natural world. Yet many of the portraits express a wry humour at what is happening to the artist herself, a bemused player in the metamorphosis that occurs as the body coughs up its complex imaginings.

Each work is made as a transparency and an edition of four lambda prints per image were then created. The lambda print is made by digitally scanning the transparency. The resulting work is an extremely rich, colour-saturated print.

In addition to her Portrait series, Maher will also be exhibiting a highly unusual and provocative sculpture at the Father Matthew Hall on Church Street, Dublin 7 (behind The Four Courts). Entitled Mnemosyne after the goddess of memory, this sculpture is literally a bed made of ice. Birth, love and death take place in bed and it is of course the repository position of many of our imaginative wanderings and dreams. The shape of the work is an amalgam of bed/ couch/ chariot/ sarcophogus. This work will be on view Wednesday to Sunday, between 12 and 6p.m, opening on the 17th April and running until the 11th May.

The artist will give a Gallery Talk at Green On Red Gallery at 1:15 on Thursday, 8th May. All are welcome.

Maher recently won the Marten Toonder Award 2002 towards the realisation of Mnemosyne. Portraits will also be on view at Purdy Hicks Gallery in London in April while The Axe (and the waving girl), will be exhibited at the New Art Centre Sculpture Park, Roche Court, Salisbury.

The Nightingale will be Cronin¹s seventh solo show at Green On Red Gallery and marks the artist¹s continuing concern with exploring painting in the age of artificial intelligence. The exhibition consists of oil on aluminium paintings measuring from 2 x 4 ft up to 6 x 4 ft. Cronin employs his characteristic dragging and scoring of paint and an extremely rich palette of colours and patterns. There are also new works in oil on paper coinciding with this exhibition.

Cronin¹s work reflects his interpretations of how visual understanding and appreciation are continually being upgraded as technological advancements evolve. Previous exhibitions, MHz (megahertz) and Taint, alluded to the obvious function of painting that is the transmission and reception of ideas, and evoked a sense of progress through a misguided association with speed.

With The Nightingale, Cronin introduces an element of Romanticism into the equation: recalling the nineteenth century celebration of the natural world in reaction to industrialisation and the Age of Enlightenment, while transposing this to the twenty-first century. These new works are to be seen as a championing of human emotion. While Cronin still uses aluminium as the Œcanvas¹ for his paintings, many are more complex in composition than previous work, with shifting under-painting obscured by fluid swaths of over-painting. The intensity and range of colour reflect the gamut of human emotions. What better to title the show than -The Nightingale?

nightingale n. a migratory songbird of the thrush family with brownish plumage. The male is known for its melodious song, especially noticeable during the breeding season. [13thC. Alteration of Old English nihtegala, from a prehistoric Germanic compound meaning Night-singer¹, from the ancestors of English night and yell.] Ode to a Nightingale, a poem (1819) John Keats. The poet recounts how on hearing the joyful song of the nightingale he is filled with an intense joy that provides an escape from his woes. But, as he considers the fact that the birds song has been an inspiration throughout history, the sound fades and he is suddenly returned to reality.

For further information on John Cronin, please contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Molly Sullivan or Georgina Jackson at Green on Red Gallery.

The next exhibition at the Green On Red will be new work by Alice Maher opening 18 April and running through 17 May.

Curated by the artist, Mark Joyce, this exhibition will feature the work of four artists, David Deutsch, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Mariele Neudecker and John Schabel. While Neudecker successfully exhibited in the Galway Arts Centre last year, the remaining three artists will be exhibiting at the Green On Red Gallery and in Ireland for the first time. Joyce¹s curatorial debut, The Idea of North, examines notions of what north is. This exhibition explores the idea of "North" as a direction, as a place and as a cultural condition. As Joyce has observed, "The imagery can shift with the times. In J.G. Frazier¹s book The Golden Bough (1922), the spirits of the nordic forest are beautifully benign. In the 1930s, much darker cultural forces annexed an entire zeitgist of romantic European culture."

The artists in this exhibition were selected for the diversity of their media and imagery as much as for their cultural location: two of the artists are North-American and two are European. American artist, David Deutsch, will exhibit both paintings and photographs In one body of work to be exhibited, Deutsch has used a high-powered lamp called a Night Sun, to photograph the isolated and strange streetscapes of the city. Mariele Neudecker, a German artist living in London, works with both video and sculpture. Her tank pieces of which one will be on view, are miniature landscapes within glass tanks. Like snow domes and momento mori, these sculptures evoke a powerful sense of both isolation and reminiscence. John Schabel is an American photographer whose Passenger series, depict anonymous individuals seated at the window of an aeroplane and photographed from the tarmac or side of the runway. Each image is cropped so that the passenger looks as if he or she is hermetically sealed in transition and isolation. Post-September 11th, these images are both eerie and compulsive. Norwegian painter Olav Christopher Jenssen paints the epidermal world, the flexible web of skin between things. Jenssen¹s large-scale oil paintings combine abstract markings with letters and numbers to construct a balance between spontaneity and discipline, recognisable imagery and personal language.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Gallery will host a Gallery Talk with Mariele Neudecker and Mark Joyce on Wednesday, 8th January 2003 at 1:15 P.M. All are welcome.

This exhibition has been generously supported by the Goethe Institut Inter Nationes Dublin.