For her solo exhibition at Green On Red Gallery in November/December, Alice Maher will show four new 'film-drawings', a new suite of limited edition prints called The Music of Things and two unique sculptural works. The works are a development of her Night Garden drawings shown at the RHA in 2007 and are an example of the artist's continuous quest to evolve her work through new languages and new materials. This is the first example of moving image in Maher's work. For the film-drawings she has worked with composer Trevor Knight to create a soundscape which is audible in parallel with the animated drawings, entwining itself in the unfolding narrative and subtly revealing the strange 'music of things'.

In these four new animated works Maher follows the metamorphosis of an image through many stages on one single sheet of paper, from the clean white page of the first drawing to the dirty messed up face of drawing number 276 where pencil marks have been applied and erased so many times that their ghost lines are an embedded part of the surface. The 'memory' of the drawings' making becomes an intrinsic element of its developing narrative.

Beginning with a sheet of A4 Hahnemuhle paper, Maher scanned each stage of the pencil drawing at 10 minute intervals preserving the images as documents in a computer. There is no 'actual' drawing, just the record of its many stages. When added together as an animated sequence the drawings form a peculiar imaginative narrative. It follows the twists and turns of the artist's decision-making process, becoming witness to the evolution of a series of images that never remains constant but grows and morphs with thought and time.

Animation, as we know it, is usually understood as the illustration of a story. In this case the narrative comes after the drawings are done, when all the images are lined up to form a sequence and a strange 'backward story' is revealed. It is the narrative of the artist's funny hybrid world. In this world people, animals and things co-exist, copulate and do combat for the contested space that is at once a simple small sheet of paper as well as the vast mytho-poetic universe.

The 7 intaglio prints are based on specific images taken from the thousand and one drawings that comprise the animated Music of Things. They come in a beautiful boxed set designed and printed by The Stoney Road Press in a limited edition of 25. Along with this we will be exhibiting two unique sculptural works, hand etched ostrich eggs.

For further information please contact Jerome or Mary at t.01 6713414 or at info@greenonredgallery.com

'Frame, Glass. Black', Niamh O'Malley's third exhibition at Green On Red Gallery, consists of a major new video work filmed at the Humber Bridge in Northeast England, a series of sculptural works using two-way glass, mirror and oil paint and a new suite of drawings. O'Malley's work often uses complex framing devices as strategies for emphasising the distance from source to spectacle. The primacy of the apparatus of production is made evident.

In 'Bridge' a frame of black contains the projection. The darkness of the bridge becomes a negative, invisible against the blackness of the cloth screen so that the visible projected areas lie within the gaps formed and framed by the structure. 'Bridge' presents a weighty and steady structure of steel and concrete which spans and frames both air and water. Each stationary shot is opened, closed and animated through an external structure/filter. Within the scrolling visual narrative, the pictorial gaps and absences kindle a presence; from concrete to water.

A series of new sculptural works relate both formally and conceptually by continuing this play with barrier and gap. Part mirror, part glass, large panes are held at angles in the space. They form viewing thresholds; double-sided spaces whose shifting reflective surfaces deny and periodically reveal their imagery.

Most recently O'Malley has had solo exhibitions in VOID Derry, Galleri Flach-Thulin, Stockhom & HIAP Project Space, Helsinki. Forthcoming exhibitions include Gaain Gallery, Seoul, Korea & Centro Cultural Monthermoso Kulturune, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.

Niamh O'Malley will be in conversation with Caroline Hancock (IMMA Projects Curator) in Green On Red Gallery on Thursday 22 October at 7pm.

This exhibition was made possible by the support of an Arts Council Project Award & Green On Red Gallery.

Thanks to The Void Gallery, Derry and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.

The Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the much-anticipated exhibition of new paintings by Paul Doran. The exhibition will consist of a significant body of new paintings, mostly small in size, painted on linen on board. The exhibition will run from September 3 to October 3, 2009.

This will be the artist’s first exhibition in the gallery in almost 3 years and will mark a significant stage in the development of his practice as one of the most engaging artists of his generation. His approach to painting has been an intensive enquiry and examination of the role and relevance of image-making today. His work is deeply analytical rather than about positing solutions. Doran makes paintings that are as conceptually rich and awkward as they are physically and visually remarkable. His starting point is the history of painting and its legacy, today, as an artform in many ways at odds with the age of digital media, an age of sound-bites, slick effects and quick fixes. Doran’s painting has a moral charge and urgency that is rare in today’s world but never so necessary.

The probing and questioning in Paul’s work is evident in the visual puzzles and conundrums that we find in paintings like Untitled (PD Ref 124) or Untitled (PD Ref 136). Vaguely mathematical figures take shape but are immediately challenged by neighbouring marks and inchoate spaces which appear much more instinctual and raw. Systems are fractured, discontinuous even obscured. Lines actively draw the eye in a variety of routes around and within the painted perimeter, never allowing easy pause and more than likely to be inconclusive. Echoes of the analytical work of Paul Cezanne and the early Cubists sound in these demanding paintings that create another dimension, a different sense of time where there is a rewarding sense of looking and receiving, simultaneously. No one puts it more eloquently than the artist himself when describing some of the tension and energy in this work:

The new paintings suggest figurative elements, without revealing specific details. Stripes, blobs, smears, scratches and triangles all gather in cluttered landscapes or polychromatic fields. Dark triangles are hidden behind a muddy veil. Slab-like forms are mashed together or caught in a moment of transition from figurative to abstract. Black dots dominate an out of focus painterly background creating a sense of anxiety or disorientation. Other paintings suggest a simplicity that is both surprising and overwhelming.

Since the artist’s last exhibition in the gallery he has exhibited in The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (solo), Sunday L. E. S., New York (solo), Western Exhibitions, Chicago and the Jerwood Contemporary Painting Show, London, Cheltenham, Norwich and Leeds.

Green On Red Gallery presents Dawning of An Aspect, an exhibition of four artists whose work offers an exploration of our capacity for perception through painting and sculpture. ‘Dawning of an aspect’ is taken from both Wittgenstein’s and Wollheim’s philosophical writings on the fundamental distinction between our perception and plain seeing. While the writings on this subject are based on painting, in this exhibition it is also applied to sculptural objects that reveal themselves through the act of looking. This twofold nature of our perception involves both the surface and subject simultaneously.

Wittgenstein's aim was to dissolve the paradoxical appearance of aspect-dawning: when looking at a picture-object we can come to see it differently, although we also see that the picture-object itself remains unchanged. Wollheim’s writings view the expressiveness of depiction through psychoanalytic concept of projection in which we come to see a piece of the external world as corresponding to an inward state of mind which he referred to as the internal spectator. The experience of seeing resemblances within the pictorial representation is an essential aspect of this idea.

Niall De Buitléar’s use of found objects and re-presenting them as sculptural forms, play with both the history of the found objects and the potentiality to mutate into abstract sculptural forms. It is the recognizable element in the works that reveals the transformation from the everyday to sculptural object.

Damien Flood’s paintings occupy a space between fact and fiction. His work, while primarily landscape in line with the traditional notion of painting reveals a world of discovery and illusion.

Laura Lancaster’s paintings reveal an element of nostalgia; the figures emerge from the blurred landscape, depicting a moment within a narrative structure that is part of a larger schema.

Sonia Shiel’s work commandeers miscellaneous everyday materials to build literal fabrications of ‘lofty’ notions. Her shambolic constructions simultaneously rouse and abandon ceremony, pomp and ego. They merge video, sculpture and paintings to expose subjects associated with the world’s make –up and by revealing their own, assume the subject of creativity itself.

Fergus Martin makes use of the world around him as a source for his paintings, sculpture and photographs. His work reflects things seen or even fleeting moments from the everyday. The geometric forms that consistently appear in his work give shape to his preoccupation with space, form and materials. This is also present in his new wall sculpture, Hoops, a continuation of his thinking in his other work, Steel, a permanent sculpture commissioned by The Office of Public Works for the entrance to The Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Steel takes the form of three stainless steel barrel-like structures, which are installed on the pediments of the double gateway. The work has a timeless quality, uniting IMMA’s historic setting with its present-day function as the country’s leading centre for modern and contemporary art. They have been likened to everything from 18th century thunder machines to vanilla ice cream containers.

While Steel is very concrete and definite, Hoops is more like a transparent funnel of air, very light and floating. An echo, in another form perhaps, of Martin’s long green painting, In The Air.

In 2008/2009 Dublin City Gallery - The Hugh Lane hosted a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Martin. Barbara Dawson, director Dublin City Gallery - The Hugh Lane wrote in her essay in the monograph Fergus Martin, published on occasion of that exhibition: “Fergus Martin’s work presents us with an elevated and distilled expression. His geometric forms are austere and simple; the horizontals of single colour would cover the entire surface of the painting but for the insistent and recurrent introduction of a white square. The regular planes of colour create a visual ensemble reminiscent of a musical variation. As they physically interact with their architectural surroundings, they initiate a separate space and time within their location.”

Gerry McCarthy (Sunday Times) wrote of this exhibition : “art that does not insist upon overt meanings can serve as a powerful vehicle for the public or artistic mood. With no need to project concrete meanings, (Martin’s) art is like a sponge and a mirror: it soaks up what is in the air and reflects it back. He draws our eyes to differences rather than trying to swamp them with mindless repetition."

Also in 2008/2009, Fergus Martin took part in Yo’ Mo’ Modernism at CCNOA ( Centre for Contemporary Non-Objective Art) Brussels, and Discussions in Contemporary Sculpture at The Dock , Carrick-on-Shannon.

There will be a talk in the gallery between Fergus Martin and Barbara Dawson on Wednesday 17 June, 7-8pm.

New works by Irish artist Mark Joyce explore critical issues of colour in optics and music. Joyce has used his knowledge of lenses, spectroscopes and other instruments, creating ink drawings and paintings that illuminate fundamental aspects of light. Isaac Newton’s colour wheel linked seven colours with the notes of a musical octave. Joyce revisits Newton’s octave with a sound piece created with Geoffrey Perrin.

The paintings refer to our experience and memory of colour and light in the world, creating a chroma-chord experience. We see the paintings simultaneously and sequentially, like a musical chord.

Joyce explores some of the classic tropes of early modernism, autonomous form, light as material, and the vertiginous and optimistic rhetoric of colour found in manifestos by artists and composers in the modernist period.

In recent years Joyce has produced large-scale works in outdoor environments, most recently at The New Art Centre in Wiltshire, UK, the Albers Foundation in Connecticut, and at the M50 in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown.

In Bea McMahon’s first solo show at Green On Red Gallery, titled Present, she explores philosophical and scientific texts on how we inhabit the present. Her practice, which involves drawings, video and sculpture, illustrates her preoccupation with the division between fiction and reality.

Einstein believed that there was no absolute simultaneity; he stated that the distinction between past, present and future were illusionary. Bea explores such ideas through a visual narrative. In her current exhibition she invokes Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy and Nikolai Federov’s Philosophy of the Common Task.

She presents nine drawings, which provide a visual lexicon for Dante’s journey with Virgil and Beatrice through hell, purgatory and paradise. The underlying theme of this poem being the moral and ethical corruption of church and society brought about by wealth. This correlates with Federov’s socialist concern with justice for all. A philosopher of the late nineteenth century his writings on the Philosophy of the Common Task disseminated his belief in the creation of technological, social and political conditions whereby people could be re-animated, re-connecting the past with the future, in a manner comparable to the Christian promise of resurrection.

In this video work she engages with the notion of a journey through space whereby Ferderov is re-animated into the ‘present’. Historical figures become agents in the pursuit of aligning matter and spirit while alluding to the continuing scientific quest to find the actual construction of mass.

The sculptures within the exhibition reference the visualisation of ‘light cones’, which are a graphic device used to represent all the possible paths in space that light can take in the past, present and future.


Bea McMahon (b.Ireland 1972) received a Masters in Visual Arts Practice from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design in 2007. Prior to that, she completed a primary degree in pure mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (1994) and a Masters degree in mathematical physics at University College Dublin (1997).
She was awarded a Visual Artist Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2005, 2006 and 2008. In 2007 she was awarded the Curated Visual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. She is included in the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland.