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

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 Byrne, John Cronin, Mary FitzGerald, Damien Flood, Mark Joyce, Niamh McCann, Caroline McCarthy, Ronan McCrea, Alice 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-Friday, 10-6pm and on Saturdays 11-3pm.

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

Bea McMahon | Plot | 22 May - 28 June 2014

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.

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.

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.

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.

Group Exhibition: New & Recent works

Opening Reception: Thurs 21 Nov, 6 - 8pm
Exhibition Dates: 21 Nov - 11 Jan 2014

John Cronin
Mary FitzGerald
Paolo Gonzato
Mark Joyce
Caoimhe Kilfeather
Arno Kramer
Fergus Martin
Niamh McCann
Caroline McCarthy
Bea McMahon
Dennis McNulty
Niamh O'Malley
Nigel Rolfe