Mary FitzGerald. Fragile (2020) Mirror and barbed wire under canvas, 30cm x 247cm x 125cm — **Mary FitzGerald.** Fragile (2020) Mirror and barbed wire under canvas, 30cm x 247cm x 125cm

UNDER THE SUN

10 September - 17 October

Under the Sun hints at the essential but sometimes intense conditions under which work is carried out and in which life is lived.
Light reflected, refracted, arrested and frozen in myriad and multiple colours and chemicals runs like a vein through Under the Sun.
Excess greets aridity. Control and laxity are uneasy neighbours. What started as a summer show becomes a display of intense encounters.
The most natural thing in the world, can be the most threatening.

Under the Sun includes new and recent work by Aoife Shanahan, Niamh McCann, Mark Joyce, Tom Hunter, Ronan McCrea, Mary FitzGerald and Nigel Rolfe.

The exhibition will run from September 10 until October 17.

For more information on the exhibition and the artists' work contact the gallery or view : www.greenonredgallery.com.

Mary Fitzgerald

Mary FitzGerald is an Irish artist who lives and works in Dublin and County Waterford. After graduating from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to Japan where she lived and exhibited between 1979 and 1981. Mary FitzGerald has held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland, Europe and the USA and has participated in group exhibitions worldwide. She has represented Ireland at ROSC, L'Imaginaire Irlandais and the XVIII Bienal de Sao Paulo. She was elected a member of Aosdána in 1990. Mary FitzGerald's work has recently been exhibited in the Renew show at the Green On Red Gallery.

'Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Mary FitzGerald's work was characterized by an elegant austerity and a calm, self-sufficient stillness. The natural restraint suggested by the sparing application of quasi-calligraphic marks on a monochromatic expanse of canvas or paper–she generally worked with a limited palette and frequently favoured black on white–tended deliberately towards understatement. This was subtly countered however, by the complex architechtonics of her most formally ambitious works, a number of which took the form of a modulated concatenation of canvases of disparate dimensions lined up along a notional horizon line. These works seemed to respond to the architecture in which they were installed, while simultaneously constituting an architecture of their own.

The sculptural aspect inherent in these multi-part paintings came increasingly to the fore during the 1990s, coinciding with the development of a more abrasive tone and the introduction of materials that included sheets of glass as well as various spikes, pins and clips. As it happens, the intimations of fragility and damage, injury and repair so evident in these formally inventive works derived to a significant degree from physical injuries suffered by FitzGerald in a car accident. Complications arising from this accident led to a decade-long period of withdrawal, silence and creative inactivity, the chrysalis state from which these recent works have recently emerged.' – Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (Representing Art in Ireland, The Fenton Gallery).

Ronan McCrea

Ronan McCrea is an artist living and working in Dublin working in photography, projected slide installations and sculpture.

Recent projects include School Play, ( 2008 ) a commission for a primary school in Dublin and New Town Centre Project ((Extract #1) ( 2009 ) produced with Draiocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin. He has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally. Solo projects include: Medium (Corporate Entities) a project for the Irish Museum of Modern Art 10,000 to 50 exhibition in April – June 2008, Medium at Gallery for One & Goethe-Institut, Dublin, 2007. In 2005 was one of seven artists who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale.

More recently his solo exhibitions MATERIALs at Green On Red Gallery, Spencer Dock and Efference Copy Mechanism at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in 2019 were well received, including the shortlisting for the MAC Award, Belfast with his 16mm found film Metallography ( Grain Structures, ' I think in Shapes : Henry Moore ', with soundtrack after Delia Derbyshire ) ( 2016 )

Niamh McCann

Niamh McCann's diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, installation, painting and video, explores philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random visual juxtapositions and spatial relationships, looking toward themes of travel, globalization and urbanization within very particular social and political contexts.

Using everyday objects and images from the contemporary urban environment, McCann makes visible poetry of chance connections, whimsy and paradox. McCann works with found materials, industrial processes and situations - given logos, re-appropriated signs, newspaper montages - that she alters and then reconfigures to create works as alternates scenarios or landscapes to question the quotidian means. Physically, many of McCann's pieces capture the viewer's reflection suggesting a concern with self, as well as a play on image, word and text. The artist builds compositions, which generate their own spatial perception and experience, creating a language that adapts the deft game of observation and veiling.

Mark Joyce

Mark Joyce’s work explores the anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience, with ideas drawn from scientific and philosophical concepts of physical light. He is currently Artist in Residence at the Marino Institute of Education/Trinity College, Dublin.

The pieces exhibited in UNDER THE SKY were created during the Covid-19 lockdown and are part of a series of 24. Each are 35x30cm is size and Acrylic.

Tom Hunter

“Many of the stones, which once littered the landscape, like an ancient forest, have been removed over the course of the millennia. The ones that remain I want to portray and personalise, to render their likeness and nobility to the wider audience that they once had, as if Kings and Queens of a forgotten age.”

- Tom Hunter on Axis Mundi

Born in Dorset, Tom Hunter moved to Hackney in 1986 where he lived in squats for 16 years. He began studying photography when he was twenty-five, and graduated with first-class honours from the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication) in 1994. He received a Master's degree at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1997. Tom then embarked on a two-year trip across Europe on a double decker bus, in which time he completed a series of portraits depicting his fellow travellers. His most recent work is a series of narratives that draw on scenes from urban east London and headlines from his local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette, using classical paintings for inspiration.

Aoife Shannahan

Aoife Shanahan. Biogram #1, Archival Inkjet Print, framed size 72.1cm x 59.2cm — **Aoife Shanahan**. Biogram #1, Archival Inkjet Print, framed size 72.1cm x 59.2cm

Aoife Shanahan. Biogram #7, Archival Inkjet Print — **Aoife Shanahan.** Biogram #7, Archival Inkjet Print

Aoife is a visual artist who lives in Dublin, Ireland. She received her MFA in Photography from the Belfast School of Art (2018). Her work is driven by a strong interest in camera-less photography. Her experimental approach towards traditional analogue materials allows her to explore their expressive possibilities and to question their contemporary relevance in a digital era.

Her work has been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibition venues include The Royal Hibernian Academy, Green on Red Gallery, The Centre for Fine Art Photography and The Griffin Museum of Photography. She was the recipient of the 2016 RHA Curtin O'Donoghue Emerging Photographic Artist Award.

Her work resides in a number of collections including The National Gallery of Ireland, The OPW State Art Collection and The David Kronn/IMMA Collection.

Aoife Shanahan. Biogram #6, Archival Inkjet Print — **Aoife Shanahan.** Biogram #6, Archival Inkjet Print

Nigel Rolfe

Nigel Rolfe's work encompasses many media that include sound and audio production, video and photography. His primary reputation for the past thirty years is working live, making performances throughout Europe, and the former Eastern Block, North America and Japan.

In the 1980s and 90s he worked with the pan-European group Black Market International. Since the late 1990s he has made solo performances in Ireland at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork in 1998, the Cork Film Centre in 2002, The Church Gallery, Limerick in 2003 and Mount Shannon, Co. Clare in 2004 both as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National programme. In 2004 he took part in the European Performance Art Festival in Lublin, Poland and made a performance in the Images 04 Festival in Vevey, Switzerland. In 2010 he took part in the EPAF 2010 at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. In 2011 as part of an evening of new works, created and directed by Nigel Rolfe, Nigel Rolfe performed along side Mary Nunan and Oscar Mascarenas together with dancers Lisa Cahill, Mihaela Griveva, Laura Murphy, Amy Prendergast and Cathy Walsh in the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick. 2012 saw Rolfe's work in Guangzhou Live 3, China, Contexts 2012 - Sokolovsko Festival of Ephemeral Art and Remnant - A Performance Art Symposium which took place in Ballina, Co Mayo. In 2013 he took part in Infr'Action in Venice and Live Action, Sweden's leading annual international performance art festival.

If you are interested in viewing any of the featured artworks in person please contact our gallery director, Jerome O’Drisceoil at +353 87 2454282 or info@greenonredgallery to arrange an appointment.