Eithne Jordan at Rubicon Gallery and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

Eithne Jordan, En Route, Works on Paper

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

Through 8 December 2012

Eithne Jordan, Street
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 
Through 21 December 2012

Just over twenty new gouache on paper paintings by irish artist Eithne Jordan is on view at Rubicon Gallery in Dublin in an exhibition entitled En Route ('On the road' in french). The paintings are uniformly encased in carefully constructed lucite/acrylic boxes, like small TV screens on pause or a glimpsed view through a car window. Individual paintings have subtle gradations of tone and hue, in this they are evocative of Giorgio Morandi’s reduced and deliberate still-life works, yet we have to assume that Jordan had much less control over her curiously quiet city compositions. The flatness of form and distance inferred in her work are suggestive of Alex Katz’ contradictory bold planes of colour and distinctive painted forms. Eithne Jordan’s compositional balance and measured brush strokes produces considered, familiar but unspecific, urban environments.

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Car Park III, 2011

Gouache on Paper, 18 x 24 cm

© Eithne Jordan. Courtesy Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

Eithne Jordan starts outdoors in her direct environs, taking countless photographs often while commuting to or from the studio and always advancing slowly on foot or bicycle. She deliberately takes incidental, unrefined, arbitrary photos - their imperfections are a valuable attribute in her work – a device she uses as a method to create a distance between what is real and how it can be manipulated and edited. The few photographs she selects as source material for paintings offer a roughness and a fragment of reality that Eithne Jordan enhances in her gouaches, as she adapts elements of the configured scenes to suit her own purposes. The detailed gouache paintings are intimate in scale and draw the viewer in, introducing a human perspective, as her works feature no figures, and are largely devoid of human presence with the occasional exception of passing traffic.    

In her major Royal Hibernian Academy -RHA- exhibition, Street [November 15 - December 21, 2012], the artist Eithne Jordan shows large-scale paintings on linen and canvas. These paintings are developed, without exception, from gouache predecessors, creating a further buffer in her re-drawn representations of reality. In replicating scenes she has produced on a small-scale, Jordan takes on new technical and compositional challenges, many details are frequently and deliberately omitted in the transition from small to larger-scale works and areas which are flat planes on a small scale become vast abstract blocks of colour. En Route, at Rubicon Gallery, features those very specific gouache images that Eithne Jordan chose to paint in oil for her Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition and, since these two exhibitions run concurrently for a time, viewers have an opportunity to see part of this artist’s working process.


A catalogue was published by the Royal Hibernian Academy for the exhibition Eithne Jordan: Street with foreword by the curator Patrick T. Murphy and essays by James Merrigan and Colm Tóibín

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Street 

RHA Exhibition Catalogue, 2012

Courtesy of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

EITHNE JORDAN was born in Dublin and lives and works in Dublin and the South of France. She studied in the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and then at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Solo exhibitions have included, Small Worlds at the Mac, Belfast and the RHA, Dublin, Street Stills, Assab One, Milan, Night in the City, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, The DOCK, Carrick-on-Shannon and Galway Arts Centre, Galway.

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 2, Ireland

www.rubicongallery.ie

Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
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Robert Bordo, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Blind Spot

Robert Bordo: Blind Spot

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

11 October - 17 November 2007

ROBERT BORDO's recent work offers abstract pictorial elements that describe the ruminative quality of experience. Meandering dots and dashes refer to weather or wandering; rippled surfaces act interchangeably as water, sky or ground; brush stroke and color field as wind or plane. His paintings  reference locations where conflict, thoughts and emotion, run together disrupting the inherent lyricism of both landscape and abstract painting. Indeed these paintings hover between abstraction and landscape utilizing the particulars of time, place and ecology. 

"All of these things are embodied in paintings of texture and nuance, positively reticent in their use of colour and form. Acutely attentive to atmosphere, they are intimate in mood and suffused with feeling -  often a quality of muted sadness, an awareness of loss - though at the same time they are thoroughly unsentimental and not particularly emotional in any overt way......... Robert Bordo indicates what almost isn’t visible, whether it’s hiding in plain sight, or fading from sight, lost in mist or falling snow or flowing water, or something distant and faint. " Aidan Dunne 2007  

New York based painter, Robert Bordo, was born in Montreal. He has exhibited consistently since 1987 at; Brooke Alexander, Tibor de Nagy, Rene Blouin and latterly, Alexander and Bonin in the United States of America. He is on the full-time faculty of The Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan and a 2007 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Rubicon Gallery present his first Solo Exhibition in Ireland. The exhibition is accompanied by a full colour publication.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

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Flix Artists, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Remote Access - Neva Elliot; Fiona Larkin; Hannes Malte Mahler; Fionna Murray; Ciaran Murphy; Isabel Nolan; David Rhodes

Flix Artists: Remote Access

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

28 April - 28 May 2005

FLIX is a cleverly constructed cabinet containing portfolios of drawings, artists’ books, paintings, prints and photographs. It has up to 60 artists’ work at any given time and they each have one portfolio in the cabinet. The idea behind FLIX was manyfold: to introduce new artists to established collectors, to encourage individuals to start a collection by offering affordable pieces and to present a larger selection of contemporary artists to an audience of artlovers, curators, artists and anyone.

The Rubicon have invited seven leading names from the world of the arts to browse through our FLIX portfolios and select one artist each that impresses them. Their work will be on the walls for the duration of the exhibition. But we also invite you to make a selection. Call in and flick through our cabinet of portfolios. Or, even simpler, just go on-line to find your favourite artist.

The Selectors are: Helen Carey - Director, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Caoimhín Corrigan - Arts Officer, Leitrim County Council; Mike Fitzpatrick - Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Aideen Howard - Director, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray; Ronnie Hughes - Artist; Hugh Mulholland - Director, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast ; Anna O’Sullivan - Director, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny

The Exhibiting Artists are: Neva Elliot; Fiona Larkin; Hannes Malte Mahler; Fionna Murray; Ciaran Murphy; Isabel Nolan; David Rhodes

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

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Nathalie Du Pasquier, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - New Paintings

Nathalie Du Pasquier : New Paintings

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

27 November - 22 December 2001 

Nathalie du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux in 1957. She travelled extensively before settling in Milan permanantly in 1979. It was in Milan that she became a founding member of the acclaimed Design movement - Memphis and latterly focussing on her own painting. ‘Memphis’ marked a revolutionary moment in contemporary design, the group addressed architecture, interior design, furniture and eclectic ‘objects’. They sought to create a more up-to-date lifestyle atmosphere and were distinguished by their “games of aesthetic mockery” and an anti-idealogical energy which gave the movement its richness, complexity and ambiguity. Led by architect Ettore Sotsasse, the group comprised several nationalities, styles, disciplines and sensibilities.

Around 1987 Nathalie du Pasquier began to focus more exclusively on her studio practise, working within the genre of Still Life. The artist believes “the studio is a place to work but also a place to live” , the objects are those that surround her in her daily working life; handtools, baskets and shoes with nothing more exotic than a patterned vase or an unusual stone. In his essay about her work in 2000 the Irish painter stephen McKenna said “This is not a celebration of banality but a means of concentrating the attention on how things are seen and painted......an attempt is made to release the visual marvels hidden beneath the surface of things”. Nathalies’ work is anchored in the representation of an object or a collection of objects but the work has no anecdotal narrative present in them. If the paintings have names, they are merely descriptive and if the objects are recogniseable that is merely incidental. Stephen McKenna noted that “A pepper becomes primarilly a colour variation of certain yellows joined to a precise green curve. It is not a giant pepper. A pair of scissors is a series of arabesques, joints and reflections where the colours and and positions of the shadows compete in importance with the objects” Scale is a key element of the work, the objects are frequently represented many times greater than life-size, in subdued, muted colours and the treatment of shadows is altogether significant.

In her new work Nathalie Du Pasquier studies her subject matter at a much closer range and exaggerates the role of shadows and reflections by looking through transparent glasses and bottles. All the objects in the paintings sit on a flat plane and contain a horizon. “Through the glass, with or without water, the shapes of things change, this horizon is broken”. In her past exhibitons, items in the painting were gathered and strategically placed to create a composition. Lately the way in which Nathalie looks at her subject matter creates the composition, sometimes forcing her to crop items out of view. In this new suite of paintings she is more assertively exploring the formal aspects of light colour and composition using still life as a conduit for these experiments.

Nathalie Du Pasquier has exhibited internationally since the late 80’s, in galleries such as ‘Le Cadre Gallery’ Hong Kong, Antonio Colombo Arte Milan and Galerie Christa Burger Munich, this is her second solo-project with the Rubicon Gallery Dublin.

Catalogue Available.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

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Hughie O'Donoghue, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Naming the Fields

Hughie O'Donoghue : Naming the Fields

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

23 October - 24 November 2001

Naming the Fields is the first showing of new paintings by Hughie O’Donoghue in Ireland. The Rubicon Gallery is double in size to host the exhibition incorporating a street level space below their first floor gallery at No.10 St. Stephens Green. Hughie O’Donoghue is one of Irelands most important painters with an established reputation in the U.K., Europe and U.S.A.. He exhibits regularly with Rubicon Gallery Dublin, Purdy Hicks Gallery London, Galerie Karl Pfefferle Munich and Galerie Helmut Pabst Frankfurt and has recently featured in major museum exhibitions in Haus Der Kunst Munich, Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge and he has a major project planned for 2002 at The Imperial War Museum London. He is represented in several public collections among them: The Hugh Lane Gallery and I.M.M.A. Dublin, The National gallery and The British Museum London, The Art Gallery of New South Wales Adelaide and Yale centre for British Art New Haven USA.

The focus in Naming the Fields is the idea of place and in particular the mythic and emotional attachment to particular ground. An exploration of how this resonates within human memory and in a very fundamental way affects who we think we are. An elderly aunt went to great pains to impress upon the artist, the names of the fields that surrounded the house where she and his mother were born. These were drawn out on a rough piece of paper with the translations from the Irish. In some cases the meanings remained unclear. Hughie O’Donoghue was affected by the poetry of this; the attempt to write things down on the rudimentary map, to try to record this truth. The new paintings take these texts and some names from the surrounding town lands as their starting point and attempt to begin to reconstruct some of this lost meaning, to give form to this remembered culture. The artist’s research yielded a 16th Century representation of County Mayo and the area of the Barony of Erris, his place of origin. Of this region, there is virtually nothing recorded - it is a tabula rasa. The paintings seek in some way to stand in this space. They are not descriptive or topographical evocations of a lost landscape but instead attempt to excavate personal and collective cultural memory. Their theme is identity and displacement and they seek in some way to trace and map this, a notion which is potent and relevant to many Irish people or indeed many displaced people.

Hughie O’Donoghue was born in Manchester in 1953. He earned a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University and for several years lived and worked in London. In 1995 he bought a house and moved his family and his studio practise to a rural area in Co. Kilkenny Ireland. Since relocating to Ireland, Hughie O’Donoghue has explored ideas around Memory and History. His source, in most cases, is a documentary archive of letters, photographs and ephemera inherited after his father’s death. The artist’s father was born in Manchester in 1918 to an Irish immigrant family and was conscripted into the British Army at the outbreak of War. The material relates to family history in general, but in particular detail to the period of the Second World War in which his father was involved. Hughie O’Donoghue has made a number of exhibitions that dealt specifically with particular historic moments. Line of Retreat (1997) dealt with the 1940 retreat of the British Forces and the collapse of the French Republic;Crossing the Rapido (1998/99) addressed the crossing of the Rapido River south of Rome in 1944. Smoke Signals (2000) showed works from both these sequences.Corp (1998) at IMMA was an attempt to map underlying themes within the work over about 15 years and place them within a broader context. As well as being specific and personal each series of work attempts to use allegory and metaphor - ‘meaning’ as a product of engagement with the subject as opposed to something placed knowingly in the work. ‘Episodes from the Passion’ (a commissioned sequence of work, which filled the entire upper gallery spaces of the RHA in 1999) and other monumental works were recently selected for Schirn Kunsthalle’s survey exhibition Geschichte und Erinnerung Kunst der Gegenwart (History and Memory in Contemporary Art). Other works on this theme will also be included in the international exhibition Legacy of Absence due to open at Buchenwald in 2002.

Catalogue Available

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Ronnie Hughes, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Shrine

Ronnie Hughes : Shrine

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

19 September - 13 October 2001

Ronnie Hughes’ recent paintings resonate with echoes of high modernist abstraction but their contemporary palette and wry humour pitch them firmly in the present day. Hughes is interested in a synthetic representation of Nature. Titles such as Wood edge, Nightsong and Noonblind point to the fact that these sparse yet well-worked paintings are a hybrid of romatic yearning and cool detachment. The artist lives and works between mountains and sea in Co Sligo.

The recent paintings resonate with echoes of high modernist abstraction but their contemporary palette and wry humour pitch them firmly in the present day. Ronnie Hughes is interested in a synthetic representation of Nature. Titles such as Wood edge, Nightsong and Noonblind point to the fact that these sparse yet well-worked paintings are a hybrid of romatic yearning and cool detachment. The artist lives and works between mountains and sea in Co Sligo.

Catalogue Available

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Michael Kane, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Absolut Classics

Michael Kane : Absolut Classics

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

14 August - 1 September 2001

For three weeks, Rubicon Gallery is hosting a stunning selection of artwork from Absolut Vodka’s world renowned art collection. This collection consists of prominent contemporary artists from the 20th century such as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Keith Haring, Peter Blake and Chris Offili, to name a few. This is the premier viewing of the original artwork in Ireland.

Absolut Vodka is one of the most prestigious vodka’s in the world. The bottle’s timeless design and quality has been a catalyst in establishing it as a cultural icon. Absolut is well known for it’s association with art and fashion world wide. “I love the packaging, I love the feeling of it, I want to do something...” -Andy Warhol, 1985. As a result of this declaration, Warhol produced the acclaimed image of Absolut’s bottle, which was subsequently used as an advertisement for the product. Since then, over 500 established and emerging artists have translated Absolut Vodka in painting, fashion, photography, sculpture, film, literature and countless other art forms.

The premier of Absolut Classics in Ireland is marked by the commissioning of an original artwork to join Absolut’s eclectic mix of artists. From the artist’s considered, Michael Kane, a well established and celebrated Irish artist, was selected. Born in Wicklow, and currently living and working in Dublin, Michael Kane came to the forefront of the Irish art world in the 1960’s and has since exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and internationally. He is also included in many private and corporate collections worldwide. His task was to give his personal interpretation of the Absolut Vodka bottle. Michael Kane’s uninhibited expressions, and energy assures his ‘Absolut Kane’ to be memorable.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie

Fionna Murray, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Drawings

Fionna Murray : Drawings

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

26 June  - 14 July 2001 

Fionna Murray currently lives and works in Galway city. She grew up in the U.K. of Irish parents and much of her work is imbued with a sense of dislocation and an exploration of identity and origins. In 1995 she graduated with a B.A. from the Chelsea College of Art in London and received a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Ulster in 1997. This is her second solo show with the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin.Fionna Murray has also had a major two-person exhibition at Galway Arts Centre late last year and has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country.

Her recent works consist of meticulous and deliberated ‘drawings’ with recurrent symbolic images or motifs; dwellings, hearths, flames and footprints. These moving minimal images deal with themes of privacy and identity in a way that defies explanation or even articulation. She lays down her marks with great consideration. These ‘marks’ are used as notations rather than descriptions. Delicate lines of sewing and subtle collage heighten the work’s materiality whilst hinting at the drawn line; defining location points, boundaries and areas of absence or presence.

“Boundaries are mapped out in a search for fragments and resemblances between things through the constant repetition of marks and erasures”.

In viewing Fionna Murray’s work one has a sense of private spaces being uncovered, places to take measure of one’s own physical presence. She registers the residue of experience and memory as a container for an elusive narrative of meanings.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

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Coílín Rush, Laura Buckley, Robbie O'Halloran, Bart O'Reilly, Alice Peillon, Tadhg McSweeney at Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Groupsix

Coílín Rush, Laura Buckley, Robbie O'Halloran, Bart O'Reilly, Alice Peillon, Tadhg McSweeney : Groupsix

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

29 May - 23 June 2001

The perennial call signalling the death of painting is constantly undermined by the raft of graduates from international Art colleges who persist in the exploration of that medium. Those young artists who choose ‘painting’, with all its limitations, associations and assumptions specifically interest the Rubicon Gallery. The six artists in this exhibition are in their early twenties and graduated or will graduate later this year from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin. They approached the gallery as a group, mindful of the rich tradition they have inherited, but determined not to be bound by it. These six artists are concerned with the hierarchical aspects of painting; subject matter, materials, presentation and meaning. All six artists agree that media images, the theory and practice of abstract formalism and an interest in the materiality of paint itself are their core concerns, yet their final images vary drastically.

Laura Buckley, from Galway, graduated with a first class honours degree in painting from NCAD last year. She is twenty four. Her work mediates between painting , sculpture and photography and combines accepted artist quality materials with non-art objects. Laura creates a series of relationships between these individual elements in her work and re-writes general perceptions of space, surface and ultimately of painting itself.

Tadhg McSweeney, born in Dublin is twenty two and will present for his degree in painting in mid-May this year. Tadhg explores surface, sometimes working from found objects (drawn to their shape, texture and surface quality) he scrapes back and adds to the under painting in search of images. Maps, machines and landscapes are implied and narratives often suggested, but the meaning of the image remains somewhat cryptic.

Originally from Waterford, Robbie O’Halloran, twenty six, achieved a first class honours Degree in painting from NCAD and is currently preparing for his Masters later this year. His interest is resolutely in issues of contemporary abstract painting. He is relentless and ruthless in editing his mark making, composition and palette to make an impression that addresses existing norms but is both innovative and challenging.

Bart O’Reilly is a twenty five year old artist from Dublin and a first class honours graduate from NCAD. He bases his work firmly on mass media images, (primarily moving and still projected segments from film and television). The content is significant but subverted and his subdued palette and treatment of surface creates further discord in our reading of the image. Finally he uses text, in the form of titles, to re-emphasise the subject or content and creates a conflict in our expectation from the final image.

Alice Peillon is from Dublin, she graduated with first class honours from NCAD and is twenty four years of age. Her images are carefully constructed combinations of shapes, patterns and colour. She extracts independent elements from a variety of sources; botanical drawings, fabric patterns and architecture which she then edits and re-deploys freely in her iridescent thickly painted surfaces.

Coílín Rush is a twenty four year old artist from Dublin and a graduate in painting from NCAD. His work deals with television as a metaphor for experience. He refers not only to the content of received material but also, to some degree to the surface quality of the transmitted image and thus explores the nature and context of our relationship with information.

On the whole this is an extremely satisfying survey of the painting practice of young artists and a validation for this gallery of the interest in the medium.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

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Amelia Stein, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin - Palm House

Amelia Stein : Palm House

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

1 - 26 May 2001

AMELIA STEIN is a photographer noted for; her touring solo-exhibitions and work in group shows such as EV+A & RHA in Ireland as well as extensive portraiture of creative people in music and theatre worldwide. As usual, this work bears her signature sensitivity, formal rigour and perfectionism.

‘The Palm House’ comprises of a series of photographs documenting one of the oldest structures in The National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. The gardens were established by the Dublin Society (now the Royal Dublin Society) in 1795. The Great Palm House was fabricated in Scotland and built in 1884, after an earlier wooden version was destroyed in a gale. It is a huge glass structure held erect by walls of teak and roof glazing bars of wrought iron. It houses rare cycads; primitive cone bearing trees some of which are extinct in the wild, tropical palms and bamboos from countries as diverse as South Africa and Brazil. It is a great national treasure and welcomes 140,000 visitors annually who have, in recent months, anxiously watched the slow arduous work of moving the precious plants, one by one (often deploying large earth-moving machinery) to a temporary home. The restored glass house, currently under supervision by the Office of Public Work, is scheduled to reopen in three years .

“ It is beautiful but not effortless. The first plants to be placed in the house had been shipped from tropical countries as resting specimens or as seed collected on a palm lined beach or a dark, dripping forest. They awoke to confined root runs but thrive, ensconced in a duplicate climate with water and food lovingly applied every day.” - Brendan Sayers, of the Botanic Gardens, in describing the “Pot and Tub” culture of the Great Palm House.

Amelia Stein embraced this project immediately and instinctively on hearing of the imminent changes at the Great Palm House. Plants were pivotal in Amelia’s relationship with her late parents. In the last few years of her mother, Mona’s, life they became particular close, as Amelia stepped in to care for her beloved garden. After her mother’s sudden death the activity became a bittersweet reminder of that time and, during her father Mendel’s illness some years later, the garden became a place of refuge and reflection. At first, she intended only to accurately record the plants and their extraordinary surroundings in the Great Palm House, but the opportunity to reenter, in solitude, this enchanted ‘secret’ garden was part of a very poignant personal journey for the artist . Much of her work addresses the universal subject of loss and memory, absence and presence and no more so than in this series. Amelia  Stein came and went regularly, watching and waiting as each individual plant marked the passing of time, and each one rewarded her with a quiet moment of splendour. Time has another meaning here. The Great Palm House has been lovingly mastered by many over the decades and millions of people - thousands of families - have a remembered experience of the place. These plants are sentinels to many dramas but they are not still or inanimate, they mark time in their own way.

“Its vastness belies the fact that one is indoors, yet the atmosphere is alien. It is damp, still and scented as though in another world and it touches you as would an unseen spectre in the night. The light is filtered, first by the opaque glass and then by the taller inhabitants of the house, their vegetation casting ever-changing shadows. There is no great sound.” - Brendan Sayers.

RUBICON GALLERY

10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2

www.rubicongallery.ie