Hannah Fitz @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Hannah Fitz: OK
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
23 April - 25 May 2019

Kerlin Gallery presents OK, the first solo exhibition by Dublin born artist Hannah Fitz. 

In OK, human scale and almost human-like sculptures occupy the gallery. The figures appear to be football players and there is a type of game at play… 

Hannah Fitz builds a comparable world where action is arrested, colour is drained, light and shadow have form, figures merge as though solid matter is fluid and gravity seems less in control. The ‘players’ perform tricks or jostle for the ball. One slides onto their knees, stripping off its shirt in celebration of a goal; others lounge nearby, dappled by the shade of foliage. Water bottles and footballs share the scene. In this defamiliarised sculptural landscape the life-size occupants come in and out of focus with an awkward grace. All are rendered in the same muted palette of off-white and mushroom grey disrupted occasionally by hand painted patterns that twist and distort form and shadows that rise up from unseen surroundings. 

Hannah Fitz’s figures are carefully constructed, rejecting sleekness for a finish that is deliberately crude, scrappy and uncertain. Despite this handmade quality, they present a uniform, reductive version of the body, much like the figurines on top of trophies. The directness of Hannah Fitz’s representation feels akin to kitsch aesthetics – but if kitsch strives to communicate togetherness and community by clearing away the specific and contentious, Hannah Fitz’s sculptures (re)trouble this form of representation by homogenising to a new, alienating extreme. Simple and inexact, painted in a faded, at times monochromatic spectrum, the figures are unidentifiable aside from their actions. Tribalism and representation are integral to football (whether national, club or community) and these sculptures seem to heighten the impersonal aspects of such representation. 

Hannah Fitz graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 2102 and is currently studying at the Stadelschule Frankfurt. Previous solo exhibitions include Knock Knock, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (2018); In the Light of the Lamp, Gallery Three, Douglas Hyde Gallery and Doggy Eyed Stare, Studio 16, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (both 2016). Recent group shows include I’M TRYING TO EXPLAIN, L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain, 2019, Tail and Heads, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 2019.

KERLIN GALLERY
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028, Ireland
www.kerlingallery.com

Liliane Tomasko @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin - The Red Thread

Liliane Tomasko: The Red Thread
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Through 13 April 2019

Kerlin Gallery presents The Red Thread, an exhibition of new paintings by Liliane Tomasko.

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour.  The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’  This new series of paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it.  Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Museo MATE, Lima 2018/19, a dream of, Blain|Southern (2018); 12 nights x dreams, Rockland Center for the Arts, New York State; Kunstwerk (two-person exhibition with Sean Scully), Sammlung Klein, Germany; Feeling Folding, PIFO Gallery, Beijing; Sean Scully + Liliane Tomasko, Fundación Bancaja, Valencia; Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami; In Visible World, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; dusk at dawn, Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock (all 2015); IVAM, Valencia, travelling to Casal Solleric, Palma, Mallorca and Herforder Kunstverein, Herford (2011); New York Studio School, New York and Zweigstelle, Berlin (both 2010).

Liliane Tomasko’s work is found in public and private collections worldwide, including: The Albertina, Vienna, AU; Bank Vontobel AG, Zurich, CH; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, LI; Hôtel des Arts, Centre Méditerranéen D’Art, Toulon, FR; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, IE; IVAM-Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, DE; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, CH; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, US; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, DE; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE; Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, DE; Try-Me Collection, Richmond, Virginia, US; VMFA Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, US.

KERLIN GALLERY
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028, Ireland
www.kerlingallery.com

Brian Maguire @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Brian Maguire
Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Through 20 August 2016

Kerlin Gallery presents Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, a new exhibition of works by the celebrated Irish painter BRIAN MAGUIRE (b. 1951).

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity.

The title of this new body of work, Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, which is taken from Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, which in turn is quoting from Dante’s Inferno. In these paintings, Brian Maguire directly confronts issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. This kind of work is difficult to accomplish, since narrators of stories of this kind, if they care, have a fear of exploiting grief as they walk the high wire between narrative and voyeurism. With Brian Maguire, however, manipulation is entirely absent from the telling and painting, per se, is to the fore.

The paintings in this exhibition are some of Brian Maguire’s most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases.

Brian Maguire’s most recent solo exhibitions include The Void, Derry (2015–2016) and Fergus McCaffrey, New York (2015). Group exhibitions and biennales include the Irish Museum of Modern Art; WIELS, Brussels; VISUAL, Carlow; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Korea; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Dublin Contemporary (2011) and the 24th Sāo Paolo Bienal (1998).

Brian Maguire’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston, USA; Museu de Arte do Rio, Brazil; Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Trinity College Dublin; Alvar Aalto Museum, Finland; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Netherlands; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Kerlin Gallery
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028
www.kerlingallery.com