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).   

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.  

Ramon Kassam | Works

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


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

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

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

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.