West of Ireland
Project Description
Ann Mc Cormick questions the relationship between painting and real space. What happens when paintings unfold into the space around them, when they become 3-dimensional? She is concerned with how we experience urban space and how this informs our perception. Ann explores the relationship between the work of art and the environment, between materiality and context, critique and commercialisation.
Initially as a painter Ann Mc Cormick was influenced by the paintings of the colourfield movement. She worked with pre-existing colours, with tactile qualities and with the possible connotations of finds, fragments and ready-mades. She has moved away from conventional attitudes to painting and the presentation of art. The image is in itself an actual space.
Ann Mc Cormick draws inspiration from the experience of the city, from the experience of architecture and streets, from the open and closed spaces of the constructed world. In fact her pictures do remind one of the experience of public spaces – but which public space is being referred to? Hardly the space, in which the individual is hidden beyond recognition. Rather one which is as little capable of dealing with intimacy but is blatantly informed by it, which presents itself as imperfect yet rich in meaning, unformed and broken, unprotected and brutal. Thus understood, the artist´s work can be interpreted as an image of privateness expanding into the public realm. Thus conferring the greatest respect to the right to individuality.
(Sigrid Schulze, Art Historian, Berlin, Mitte Museum)
Ekasala’s materials and process inform the play between abstraction and representation in her work. “My paintings are never thought up in advance. I worked primarily with oils on linen until several years ago when I began to work with acrylic on paper. This has brought much more to my practice. I feel less restraint, freer to experiment, always looking for new approaches to bring an image out. For years I worked, for the most part, abstract until this introduction of acrylic and paper. Suddenly and surprisingly figures or figurative images began to appear!”
Ekasala was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and studied at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1983, she set up her first studio in Miami Beach and became a member of the Artifacts Art Group, which staged weekly events at Miami’s Fire & Ice nightclub. In 1987, Ekasala moved to Paris, where she became part of a diverse artistic community that organized the first artist squat to become legal in Paris. In 2001, Ekasala moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Today, she resides with her family in East Burke, Vermont.
Ekasala’s work has been exhibited at numerous institutions around the world, including Burlington City Arts VT, the Hall Art Foundation in Reading, Vermont; Metalstone Gallery in New York City; PIERMARQ* in Sydney, Australia and Schonfeld Gallery, Brussels. Terry was the recipient of the 2023 Vermont Art Prize.
In Terry Ekasala’s abstract paintings, perceivable subjects – figures, landscapes, interiors, objects – are evoked, yet never fully revealed. This ambiguity of form, rendered through a deep understanding of the narrative and haptic power of translucently rendered color, suspends the image somewhere between abstract composition and storytelling, creating interior, psychological spaces evoking memory and place.
Chrissie Isles, the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Stuart Elster was born in New York City and lives in Brooklyn. He received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of the Arts and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale University School of Art. Stuart has been represented by Junior Projects Gallery, Lucas Schoormans and Tate Galleries. In New York he has had solo and group exhibitions at Sala Projects Gallery, Junior Projects Gallery, Lucas Schoormans, Tate, Marvelli, Schroeder Romero and Nicole Klagsburn Galleries. Nationally, at Yale University School of Art’s 32 Edgewood Gallery, New Haven CT, Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, Happy Lion Gallery in Los Angeles CA, Schmidt Contemporary Art, Saint Louis, MO, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago, the Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, University of the of the Arts in Philadelphia. Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho. Internationally his work has been shown in Italy, France, Austria India and Germany. A selected Bibliography of Stuart’s work includes, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Artcritical, Hyperallergic and Tema Celeste magazine. Profiles and interviews with the artist have been published in Heeb magazine and the Kunstforum International.
Stuart Elster is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and a Visiting Artist in the Summer drawing Marathon at the New York Studio School. Stuart was the former Director of the BFA Fine Arts Department and critic in the Summer MFA program at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia PA. He has been a visiting artist and guest critic at Yale University New Haven, CT. and Yale University Norfolk summer program, Brooklyn College MFA program, NYU Steinhart MFA Program in Studio Art, School of Visual Arts, NY DePaul University, Chicago, IL School of the Art institute of Chicago, Chicago IL, Rice University Houston TX, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX and the Kunstakademie Munster, Munster Germany.
SIMILE (2004)
Over the past twelve years I devoted myself entirely to drawing, making a total of two hundred and twenty drawings. The present book contains a selection of thirty-nine of them, dating from the last six years. My work is marked by monomania. Unlike those artists who from time to time venture to take a new turning, I seem to be the type of artist who recognizes a small field as his or her domain, to be explored in depth and detail. In the drawings made during those twelve years, the main principles remain the same. Changes do not occur in the form of an abrupt break; instead, they appear as gradual shifts, leaving the core intact, like landscapes at the turn of the season.
Some of the changes came about in spite of myself. The drawings became less linear, angular and gauche, and increasingly more modelled with soft-woolly, silver-grey tones. In that respect, they became more classical, although drawing in a classical way is not particularly my preference.
The drawings are all done on the same kind of paper and in charcoal or – when colour is needed – pastel. Wiping and rubbing are occasionally used as techniques in their own right, just as important as drawing proper. Traces of earlier positions of heads and limbs are still visible, showing how the bodies obeyed the choreographer’s guiding hand. In all drawings, the bounds of what is anatomically possible are exceeded. The female body, which in some of my drawings verges on androgynous, is remodelled into simple and elegant calligraphy – unnatural yet credible. The guiding principles in making these drawings are conciseness and reservation. To my feeling, these principles are not of my own choice; they seem to be dictated by the drawings themselves. Every drawing contains no more than what is strictly necessary. Everything that could provide time and space coordinates is absent.
The drawings are decidedly not representations of situations existing in reality. Rather, they are incarnations of frames of mind. The bodies are nude but neutral – vehicle rather than flesh. They remain in the domain of the spirit.
In the older work, all postures are still, and countenances unmoved. There is no suggestion of movement or spontaneous expression – just an intensely concentrated posture which seems to have been adopted for eternity, as being the most meaningful one. More recent work shows figures immersed in complete self-absorption: profound sleep, unconsciousness, or death. The postures in some of the drawings – for instance, that in which a figure is composed of flocks of hundreds of migratory birds – are akin to that of Maria in a state of swoon in paintings representing the ‘descent from the cross’. Occasionally, instead of an absence of time there is momentarily frozen time. Postures display a tension like that of compressed springs; the absence of movement seems to be but the lull before the storm. Faces also tend to become more expressive. Drawings belonging to this group were preceded by a series containing creeping and lying figures, their bodies covered with volcanic landscapes. Apart from suggesting plasticity, these landscapes are also patterns on the bodies. In this series might also be included a drawing made after a stay in the Himalayas in 1999 – one of the few to refer to a concrete experience – in which the body is filled with glaciers and faades of mountains. Whether or not the landscape in this drawing is spatial is equivocal. Two different scales, that of the body and that of the landscape, coexist. Less equivocal are the patterns of tattoos covering the skins of some figures. However, although these patterns are just linear and therefore less illusionistic, they, too, confuse the eye by displaying multiple image layers. Initially the tattoos were drawn in ink. In later drawings they were incised into the paper itself by means of a surgical knife; thus, the drawings enter the realm of the third dimension.
Drawings featuring swarms and flocks are the most recent. Here the shape of the body partly dissolves into a pattern of vibrating particles. Such decomposition of a form which is experienced as absolute appears again, though in a rather different manner, in drawings of mosquitos settled on faces. The red transparent bodies of the mosquitos are full and drop-shaped. As winged drops of blood they will soon spread. Transience is a permanent companion.
The drawings elude traditional iconography. In its place, use is made of physical sensations granting access to the inner mind. Human bodies are joined to animals or elements of a landscape. This fusion of incompatible entities has a matter-of-course calmness in spite of being enforced and creates a short-circuit in reason. For a short moment in time meaning can be perceived in a different way. This mechanism is analogous to that of imagery in language. Each drawing contains a trope: a simile or a metaphor.
In relation to the drawings, the present text should also be perceived as a simile, and no more than that.
J.K.
Elizabeth Magill’s paintings are enigmatic and evocative psychological takes on the traditional landscape genre. Rich with fragmented forms and kaleidoscopic patterning her images are formed from the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs, to become something other. Although depicting realistic rural or coastal settings, the term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s works – landscapes not conceived by direct observation but imbued with a sense of self and reflection. Though they have a cinematic beauty, her paintings are eerie and foreboding: trees or telephone wires conceal the view, birds flock in the night sky, distant silhouetted human figures, hills, lakes and over everything there is often a lurid, polluted light which broods over impending environmental disaster and an apocalyptic threat of instability. Her images stem – as much as does her imagination – from the County Antrim coast of her childhood and the unhappy coexistence of a landscape of legendary beauty with a social history skewed by political conflict and toxicity.
Magill’s complex and densely layered paintings employ a multitude of techniques including stencilling, screen-printing and collage as well as the pouring, blending, dripping and scraping away of paint. Film and photography are also central to her work, infusing her approach to light, tone and atmosphere.
Elizabeth Magill was born in Canada in 1959 and studied fine art in Belfast College of Art, Ireland 1979-82, and the Slade School of Art in London 1982-84. Magill’s work is represented in many museum and public collections worldwide including TATE, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; The Arts Council of England; The Arts Council of Northern & Southern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; The British Museum, London; Towner Art Gallery & Museum, Eastbourne; Worchester Museum and Art Gallery; Southampton City Art Gallery; Walsall Art Gallery & Museum, The Government Art Collection, The British Council and the National Gallery of Australia.
Magill lives and works in London and Ireland. Her next solo show is with the Annley Juda Gallery, London opening on the 28th of September 2023.
Cristín Leach is one of Ireland’s leading art critics. A bestselling author and broadcaster, she is a Doctoral Candidate at TU Dublin for a PhD by Prior Publications in the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research (SEPR). She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University College Cork and a Masters of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University.
Her art criticism has been published in The Sunday Times Ireland since 2003, and she has worked as an art critic in print, TV, radio, and digital media since 1998. Her writing on art has also been published in Irish Arts Review, Circa Magazine, and by the Irish national public service broadcaster at RTÉ.ie. Her memoir Negative Space was published by Merrion Press in 2022.
In 2020, she presented Ireland Portrayed, a four-part radio documentary series for RTÉ Lyric FM, which explored ways in which Ireland and Irish identity have been represented in art since the 1700s. Through the Canvas, which she co-presented for RTÉ Lyric FM, won silver at the New York Festivals Awards and was shortlisted for the 2019 Prix Marulić International Radio Festival in Croatia. In 2019, she curated the 21st Century Ireland in 21 Artworks exhibition for the Earagail Arts Festival in Donegal, based on a series of articles she wrote for RTÉ.ie in 2017.
She has written essays for artist catalogues, arts organisations, and public and corporate collection publications. She has been a guest or visiting lecturer in critical journalism, art writing, and cultural criticism at Limerick School of Art and Design (MA Social Practice and the Creative Environment), University College Dublin (MA Art History, Collections and Curating) and University of Limerick World Academy (MA Festival Arts).
Since 2011, she has delivered public talks and hosted and participated in symposia and panel discussions on art and the role of the critic and criticism including: Art Criticism Now (The Lab, Dublin, 2011), The Role of the Critic (The View, RTÉ Television, 2011), Doubt and Visual Representation (MA in Modern and Contemporary Art Symposium, UCC, 2013), Critical Writing: Future Modes of Engagement (Visual Artists Ireland and AICA Ireland at the National College of Art and Design, 2013), The Value of Criticism (Glucksman Gallery, UCC, 2016), Arts Broadcasting in Ireland (Limerick Media and Arts Conference, 2016), Everyone’s a Critic (RTÉ Cruinniú na Casca, Dublin Castle, 2017), Where Are The Critics? (Limerick Media and Arts Conference, 2021).
Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in Winter Papers 3, 5 and 7 and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. She was Writer in Residence for the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival in 2021. Her second book, From Ten till Dusk – A Portrait of the RHA in 12 Stories, will be published in Summer 2023.
Since 2021, she has been President of the AICA Ireland, the Irish national section of the International Association of Art Critics / l’Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art. Her critical practice focuses on the moment of engagement and employs journalism methodologies to publish and broadcast in media environments where the audience is “the general public”.
An Australian-American, Fran O’Neill, was born in Wangaratta, Australia, and currently lives and works between Australia and Brooklyn, New York. O’Neill attended Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, earning a BFA and Post Graduate Degree. Her post-graduate work continued at the New York Studio School’s Certificate Program, and her MFA was completed at Brooklyn College. She has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation award.
O’Neill’s solo exhibitions include at: Sears Peyton Gallery, NYC; Hathaway Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; West End Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; David Schweitzer Contemporary, Bushwick, New York; Miller Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; BMG Gallery, Adelaide, Australia; TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia; Life on Mars Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, John Davis Gallery, New York; New York Studio School, New York; andSussex College, Hastings, UK. In 2016 her work was exhibited at MOCA in Jacksonville, Florida in a group exhibition titled Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction, and most recently her work was included in Vital Presence, curated by David Cohen at 1GAP Gallery, in Brooklyn.
O’Neill’s work has been included in various group shows throughout the USA and in Australia. She has recently taught at the New York Studio School, Arts Students League and Pratt Institute. Her work resides in private collections in the USA, Australia and UK, and in the permanent collection of MOCA, Jacksonville, Florida.
Fitzgerald’s paintings are a response to things that surround him in his daily life while also being exploratory and a reflection on the history of the medium itself and its possibilities. He is also influenced by other art forms such as music, poetry, literature and cinema. For him, painting is not just a visual phenomenon but is also a bodily and haptic experience. The material density of his works as painted objects, contrasts with different kinds of ambiguous images where the difference between abstraction and representation is blurred and unclear. Over the years, different, contrasting family groups of paintings have evolved which explore different qualities, procedures and images. Though his works have an economy of means and are usually modest in size, Fitzgerald seeks a certain kind of intensity and reflective experience which is built up slowly over time. A state of affairs exists in his paintings and drawings where it is not clear if everything is collapsing and falling apart or, on the contrary, forming and coming together. Combining organic and constructed elements, these intermediate, transitional domains are what give his paintings their tension and dynamics:
…a painting should be a lived thing, it is lived through in its making and in the viewing, as such it will often contain certain failures or inherent problems. It is very often the case that the unresolved has a lot of truth in it. For me a painting is an entity that should not depend on a fixed one-dimensional face to the world. It is an accumulation of evidence which reflects the life of its own making and the daily life that has gone into it.”
Reviewing an exhibition of his drawings at Guest Room Contemporary Art in Brussels in 2010 for the Brooklyn Rail, the poet and writer John Yau wrote “By responding to his immediate environment, Fitzgerald shares something with two older abstract artists, Raoul De Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski. Fitzgerald’s works do not suffer by comparison. Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is Basic – there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on coloured pencils, ink, and collage – nothing fancy. And yet – and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist – the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted.”
Melissa Meyer received both a BS and an MA from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at The Lennon Weinberg Gallery, New York Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland.
Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions—one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York; Texas Gallery, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York and the National Academy of Design in New York, an organization of which she is a member.
She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and an eight by fourteen-foot ceramic mural for the new U.S. embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum and many other public and private collections across the United States.
Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and two Pollock Krasner Foundation grants-2009 and 2020. She was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in 2012 and the Bogliasco Foundation outside of Genoa, Italy 2005, and the BAU Institute in Cassis, France 2016. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and an artist member of the Yaddo board, as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.
With Miriam Schapiro, Meyer authored the seminal and widely reprinted essay “Femmage,” first published in the 1978 issue of Heresies magazine. In 2016, Meyer wrote an essay for the popular Painters on Painting blog about Jean Dubuffet.
Sharon Horvath is represented by the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton, New York and the Merola Gallery in Provincetown, MA and is an Academician of the National academy Museum and School. She has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India in 2013-14. Other awards include a Certificate of Honor from Tyler School of Art Alumni Association, the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant for Painting and a Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum in New York City . Horvath received the Richard C. Von Hess Award for excellence as a teacher and mentor from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, where she taught for five years. She received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants and the Rome Prize Fellowship for painting by the American Academy in Rome. She was a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation “space program” resident. She received an NEA Regional Grant (Mid-Atlantic) and an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Prize as well as a Purchase Award for the Utah Museum of Fine Art. Horvath’s first grant was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting. She was also a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Horvath received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York City and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia and Temple Abroad in Rome. She was awarded a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Scholarship by the Tyler School of Art. Since 1987, Horvath has shown her paintings and drawings in solo exhibitions in New York at Lori Bookstein Fine Art and Tibor De Nagy, Philadelphia, Boston, Provincetown and internationally and is represented in numerous public and private collections.
Horvath is also a Professor of Painting and Drawing, School of Art & Design at SUNY Purchase.
Anne Ryan is renowned for her ‘cutouts’ – virbant, three-dimensional paintings made from card, collage, canvas, ceramic and metal. Many of her cutouts focus on the physicality of the human form – often depicting groups of figures dancing, posing, swimming, frolicking in the woods, even cutting loose in a mosh pit – and are inspired as much by scenes found in nightclubs and cinema as by classical painting and sculpture.
Ryan has said about the cutouts: “I love the freedom they give me. Suddenly you’re not tied to the four walls of a canvas … It’s almost like not painting. I say to my students: stop painting and then let’s paint. And it’s that idea that we stop assuming what we know about painting and then let’s do something, OK? Let’s make then. And that’s when I’m really engaged with.”
Born in Limerick, Ireland, Anne Ryan studied at Limerick School of Art and Birmingham University and was Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome in 2016. She has taught at a number of leading UK art schools, including Turps, and has exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, CAPC Bordeaux and Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt. Anne lives and works in London and is represented by greengrassi.
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. Maguire’s most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his 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.
Solo exhibitions include: Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago, USA (January 2021); War Changes It’s Address, American University Musuem, Washington DC, and United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA (both 2020); Scenes of Absence, Rubin Center, Texas University, USA (2019); Escenarios de ausencia, Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2019); War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2018); Concerned, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Naked Truth, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2018); Demise, Cleveland University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH, USA (2018); The sea is the limit, York Art Gallery, UK (2016); Conversations, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) and Ni Una Mas, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA (2010).
Erin Lawlor (b. 1969 in Epping, England) received her Bachelor of History of Art in 1992 from Paris-Sorbonne University, France.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “entre chien et loup” at Luca Tommasi in Milan (2021), “Memory of a Free Festival”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland (2020); “Erin Lawlor” at Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC (2019); “cat on the raz,” Espacio Valverde, Madrid; “hiraeth,” Fox/Jensen Gallery, Sydney; “here to the hidden hills,” Fifi Projects, San Pedro, Mexico (all 2018); “Erin Lawlor,” Rod Barton, Brussels (2016).
In 2017, a survey exhibition of Lawlor’s work, “onomatopoeia,” took place at the Rothko Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, and her work was showcased in “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2016.
Recent group exhibitions include “10” at PM/AM, London; “Holding Hands” at Union Gallery, London (both 2021); “Hallucinogenic” at Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam (2020); “Wet, wet, wet: Erin Lawlor, Aida Tomescu, Liat Yossifor”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory, Auckland; “British Painting 2019” at Space K, Seoul (2019); “A brief History of Abstraction,” Rønnebæksholm, Denmark; “L’Echappée Belle, Erin Lawlor/Bram van Velde,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France (2018) (…)
Her work is present in numerous private collections. Public collections include the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge, UK; the Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia; and corporate collections include Kolon Group Art Collection, Seoul and the Nordstrom collection, U.S.A.
Lawlor currently lives and works in London, UK.
She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, and Fox/Jensen and Fox/Jensen/McCrory galleries, Sydney/Auckland, and Luca Tommasi, Milan.
Eddie Kennedy was born in North Tipperary in 1960 and now lives in Dublin. First exhibiting at the Independent Artists Exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1982, he graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a Distinction in Painting in 1983. He was awarded a full scholarship by the University of Cincinnati, where he received a Masters in Fine Art Painting in 1989. Subsequently, Kennedy spent a number of years in New York painting, exhibiting and working alongside established US artists. He has maintained a significant presence in the United States where he has shown with John Cacciola in Chelsea and at art fairs in LA, Miami and Chicago. Kennedy’s work has also been exhibited in the United Kingdom and Europe. Early solo shows in Ireland included the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Dublin and the Riverrun Gallery in Limerick. He returned home to Ireland with a solo show at Dublin’s Irish Life Exhibition Centre in 1996. Later Kennedy exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery in Dublin and had solo shows at Éigse, Carlow (2000 and 2009) and was included in the Éigse, 30th anniversary exhibition (2010) at VISUAL, Carlow.
He has been the grateful recipient of awards from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation and TippFM. In 2017 he was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. He was elected as a member of Aosdána in 2017. Publications on his work include Find (2007, ISBN: 978-0-9556736-0-3) and Thread (2012, ISBN: 978-0-9564950-9-9).
Kennedy has been represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, since 2004.
Jennifer Samet, Ph.D., is a New York-based art historian, curator, and writer. She is a professor of Art History at the City University of New York and co-directs the gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in downtown Manhattan. She completed her dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center on Painterly Representation in New York: 1945-1975. She has lectured at universities across the country on the subject of “The Role of Empathy in Art.” Her writing on both abstract and representational painting has been published in Master Drawings, Hyperallergic, ArtNet Magazine, the New York Sun, and numerous exhibition catalogs. She curated major historical exhibitions on The Jane Street Group, the history of the New York Studio School, and “Reconfiguring the New York School.” She is particularly interested in the voice of the artist, and has published many interviews with painters.
Putting together two or more parts into an order is a narrative. Often when starting a painting I have a specific sequence in mind, a self-righteous one with clearly identifiable assignations to the parts. Presuming that the baseline purpose of all critical activity is to unmake and/or complexify a preexisting order, mine is to both answer the urge to express my particular narrative, and to hope for its undoing.
My work is as much a monitoring of my uses and abuses of really primitive psychoanalytic models as it is an articulation of them. I know letting obsolete thought regimes go is the price I pay for cognitive realignment. In periods I have painted towards the comfort and confirmation of what I already know – this always fails – and in stronger times towards upending it. Which imperatives are open for analytic adjustment and which ones are temperamental are not always clear to me.
My work is a narrative retrofitted to the resistance, tempo and mess of paint. Distinctions blur, categories bleed and pollute each other and uncover multiple complicities in their painted incarnations. The material evidence of this process is the doubleness I experience when in front of a painting: the phenomenological excess. This never-perfect-fit between image and its container is both my reward and irritant.
Like everyone else, I struggle with painting’s relevance; I place the point of my continued use of it on its limitations.
Painting’s analogy to skin isn’t new: the painted surface is a hide where battle-scars remain as a record of its experiences. The privacy of painting makes the analogy even easier: I stroke, lick, brush, bathe, in its unmaking I sand and cut. I am drawn to the dumb puns and double entendres of the body, the creases that stand in for other creases, apertures that open in place of other apertures, infantile behaviors that return as adult ones, etc.: thought games that make the intolerable tolerable. In paint I am looking at a viscous flourish that reminds me of something else, but is potent enough to keep me from naming that other thing –.
If consciousness knows itself through (painted) language, it is by mining painting for its systemic/grammatical failures that I can hope to find unexpected outcomes to my narrative. I want to pry the subject away from its infatuation with fluency.
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Currently a full professor at Mason Gross School of the Art, Røgeberg previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union and Yale School of Art, and was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.
Born in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1953, Robert Armstrong lives and works in Dublin, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, also in Dublin. He is a Founder Member of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and was Head of Painting at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) from 2002 until his retirement in 2018, having taught at the college since 1991. He has exhibited regularly in Ireland and abroad for more than forty years. His work is included in many private and public collections and has been the subject of essays by writers including Aidan Dunne, Declan Long and Colm Tóibín.
Selected exhibitions include Vision X, curated by Diana Copperwhite, RHA Gallery, Dublin. Participating artists include Norbert Schwontowski, Joyce Pensato, Thomas Nozkowski (2019); Water Mountain – Made in Hong Kong, (solo) AVA HKBU, Hong Kong (2019); Squeegee Paintings, (solo) Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2019); Slips and Glimpses, Robert Armstrong and Anna Bjerger, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2016); VOLTA New York, Solo Presentation with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2015).
Glenn Goldberg was born in the Bronx, NY, studied at the New York Studio School and received his MFA from Queens College. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and LACMA, plus others. Goldberg has shown in New York, Boston, St Louis, and Munich, and is represented by Jason McCoy Gallery, NYC.
Goldberg creates luminous works made of delicate brushstrokes and flecks of color. His intricate designs seem to float off the surfaces and recall outsider art, Tantric drawings and stained glass. A recent series of paintings, each titled Wish, feature flowers with kaleidoscopic geometries of petals on subtly grayed backgrounds sprinkled with black dots. Goldberg’s paintings refer to anti-authoritarian attitudes of the 1970s that brought political and aesthetic movements such as feminist art and pattern painting to the forefront. He states that his paintings “attempt to facilitate the inexplicable.”
In his current exhibition, Of Leaves and Couds at FreedmanArt, NY the paintings bear Goldberg’s language of recognizable “dots” and transparent washes of color and grisaille. At once tactile and ephemeral, the “dots” articulate spaces that are both shallow and deep, alive, and unnervingly still. In a recent review, Roberta Smith said of Goldberg’s paintings: “He builds his images from infinitesimal dots that give the works an ambiguous, almost celestial ethereality and infuse his surfaces with an air of devotional quiet.” In this way, the marks not only construct pictorial space, but are a record of concentrated attention, time, and devotion. The earlier collages in the exhibition, created during an extended visit in Prato, Italy in 1989, utilize line and opacity in an intuitive and deliberate way. They are graphic in nature, though the hand is always felt. As in the recent works, they rely on layering (Goldberg has referenced making pictures “back to front”), and include ideas of the monumental, air, and privacy, within and across individual works.
In a statement for an exhibition at the Albany Museum of Art in 1989, then curator Peter Doroshenko wrote: “[The paintings blend] in a loose philosophical way various western iconography, dream sources, and Freudian imagery. Glenn Goldberg’s paintings contain many groupings, codes or “pools” of reference, molded intuitively from a multiplicity of sensibilities. In taking them out of their usual context and placing them in an environment that is unnatural, the works become both fictional and dramatic. Goldberg’s art flows from an immeasurable vacillation between the grand and the intimate… He does not make epic pictures to be worshipped, though each breathes deeply of the sublime.”
Denis Farrell was born in Ireland, and after graduating from Limerick School of Art Farrell started exhibiting his work at Taylor Galleries in Dublin. In 1989 Farrell attended the New York Studio School, and then received his MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art in 1993. From 1994 until 1999 Farrell maintained studios in New Haven, Connecticut and in New York City while exhibiting in New York, Boston and Ireland. In 1997 Farrell founded Bingo Hall, a contemporary Art Space, in Williamsburg Brooklyn, to exhibit the work of a diverse group of international artists not represented by the commercial gallery system. The gallery was opened by Nan Annan, wife of Kofi Annan former Secretary General of the UN. In 1999 Farrell had his first museum show at Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2003, with catalog. In 2005 he was invited to exhibit at Irish Art Center in New York, and at The Dock Art Centre in Ireland in 2009. Farrell has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright scholarship for independent research, and grants from the Arts Council Ireland, and Culture Ireland. He has been teaching painting and drawing in Ireland at the Galway-Mayo and Sligo Institutes of Technology since 2000. In 2014 he founded Lodestar School of Art, a painting/drawing summer intensive. Farrell now divides his time between Aubepierre-sur-Aube in France and Ireland with his wife and two children.
Alice Maher’s practice comprises many different media including drawing, sculpture, installation, print, photography, and more recently animation. In 2012 the Irish Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of her work. She is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery London and Nolan Gallery in NYC. Maher has exhibited widely in Ireland, England and the United States, and represented Ireland in the 22nd Sao Paolo Biennale. The Irish Museum of Modern Art held a mid-career retrospective which charted her focus on materials in metamorphoses in 2012. In 2007 a large survey show of her work entitled Natural Artifice was held at the Brighton and Hove Museum. Also in that year she completed a major drawing installation The Night Garden for the RHA in Dublin. Orsola was an installation at the Oratorio di San Lodovico in Venice in 2006. The previous year she exhibited Rood at the Green on Red Gallery Dublin. Her Portraits were shown at the Purdy Hicks Gallery London in 2003. Gorget was the title of her exhibition at the David Nolan Gallery New York in 2000. Other solo shows include Knot at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Dublin in 1999, Swimmers at Le Credac Centre d’Art, Ivry-sur-Seine in 1996 and ‘amiliar at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin in 1994. She lives and works in Ireland.
Lodestar | Ireland 2019
Thank you for your interest in Lodestar School of Art. We are currently accepting applications for the Work Study position for 2019.
Lodestar | Ireland 2019 is a 10-day painting and drawing intensive held at Glenstal Abbey and Castle, Murroe, County Limerick in the West of Ireland, from 4-16 August. This year’s guest faculty are internationally recognised artists from Europe and the U.S., including artists, critics and academics Glenn Goldberg, Alice Maher, Judy Glantzman, Sharon Horvath, John Yau, Chuck Webster, and Denis Farrell, plus other distinguished guests. The course promises to be both rigorous and rewarding.
The Role
We have one Work/Study position for an individual who is willing to help with light administrative work, social media, driving, act as a liaison between students and staff, and other, very minimal adhoc support to the Director and School Coordinator. The bulk of the support will be required in the first two days of the course, and the last day. The remaining time is yours to spend working as a student artist.
Essential Requirements
Must first be admitted to the course through the normal application process
Be a proficient multi-tasker and a team player with a positive, can-do attitude
Possess a full, clean driver’s license (and ability to drive in Ireland)
Access to a car
Fluent in English
In Exchange
In exchange for the support required the Course Fees are reduced to €1,500.
To Apply
Please first apply to the course (http://lodestarschoolofart.com/#apply)
Include a short cover letter indicating you are interested in also applying for the Work/Study position
Include a CV with your application materials
Questions?
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Connie Farrell, Course Coordinator
connie.farrell@lodestarschoolofart.com
+353(0)877669622
Dannielle Tegeder was born in Peekskill, NY. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. She received her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Art Institute of Chicago. Tegeder’s work employs strategies connected to Post-Minimalism and Twentieth-Century abstraction, often utilising mathematical, architectural or demographic data to produce an ever-evolving visual vocabulary. Her work is influenced by the mechanical drawings she observed as a child growing up in a family of steamfitters.
For the past ten years, Tegeder’s work has explored abstraction and architecture. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has expanded her practice to large-scale installation, sculptural objects, sound, and animation. Her work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. Tegeder has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her works are in the Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.
Tegeder is the recipient of several residencies and grants including The Yaddo Foundation, The Triangle Foundation Residency and Workshop, Elizabeth Foundation in New York, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Residency at Governor’s Island, Smack Mellon Studios and Artist Stipend, Banff Centre for the Arts, Artist Residency in Banff, Canada, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower East Side Print Fellowship Edition Award, National Studio Program, P.S.1/MOMA Affiliate, Clocktower, New York, NY, ART OMI, Omi International Arts Center, Omi, NY, Henry Street Settlement Studio Fellowship, NY, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Fellowship, NY.
Tegeder has recently exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Augeo Art Space in Rimini Italy, and National Gallery in Washington D.C. She has upcoming exhibitions at the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, and the Frist Museum in Nashville.
Chuck Webster is from Binghamton, New York, and was educated at Oberlin College, American University and Brooklyn. His work appears in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Baltimore Museum. He has shown in New York, Boston, Copenhagen, Cologne, London, Cincinnati and other locations.
“I work in paintings, drawings, collage and prints. I strive to make work that is clear, layered and generous. I want the pictures to be ordered in terms of scale, color, shape and surface. I am interested in an image that contains beautiful moments of material and engages the viewer on many levels. The images are drawn from personal history as well as from shapes and phenomena that I observe in the world. As a work gets going, the answers to its resolution appear often from a place inside the picture that could never have been anticipated from its outset.”
Roberta Smith of The New York Times, in her review of Webster’s 2012 solo exhibition, underscores the rigour behind the paintings. “Mr. Webster puts his motif through its paces, milking it for various associations, exploring different figure-ground relationships and adjusting paint handling, color and spatial depth, always guided by a generous, enlarging impulse. In the most memorable work, the black lines are thick, the area within them is white and the surrounding ground is sectioned off in big blocks of red and orange. The whole thing jumps. But each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.”
The work nourishes its own continuity. The paintings call to mind domestic or sacred objects that could be held in the hand or encountered in a forest or antique shop. The work of making the picture and contacting the surface with the brush and hand leaves behind evidence of a journey of decisions and a history of making and touch, much as a well-worn tool contains the history of the touch and work of its owner.
Chuck Webster is currently a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Helen O’Leary was born in County Wexford, Ireland, and studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before coming to the United States to continue her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1987, M.F.A., 1989) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Penn State in 1991 and is currently a Professor of Art there.
She has participated in group exhibitions around the world, including at the National Gallery of Art in Limerick, Ireland; the Glasgow Museum of Art in Scotland; the Scott Pfaffman Gallery in New York City; the Galerie le Petit Port in Leiden, The Netherlands; the Contemporary Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia; and in Shanghai, China. The Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago; the Michael Gold Gallery in New York City; the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; The Beverly Art Centre in Chicago; the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India; the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, and the Catherine Hammond Gallery in Cork, Ireland, are among the many venues that have mounted solo exhibitions of her work.
Helen O’Leary’s art has been honored with two Pollock-Krasner awards (1989, 1996) and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture (2000); several grants from the Arts Council of Ireland; residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan, Ireland, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Almeria, Spain; and most recently both the Culturel Irlandaise and Guggenheim fellowships. She has also been a visiting artist in Ireland, at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, GMT Galway, and the University of Limerick; in Scotland, at the University of Glasgow; in Australia, at Edith Cowen University in Perth and Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne; as well as at several universities in the United States.
Long interested in the relationship between language and literature and art, she will be spending her Guggenheim Fellowship term in New York, Paris, and Berlin where she hopes to further explore the texts and letters of Samuel Beckett and shape her material response to them.
Diana Copperwhite studied Fine Art Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She completed an MFA at Winchestor School of Art, Barcelona in 2000. Diana is a tutor at the National College of Art and Design,Dublin. Her work is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland, and also in collections in the United States, Europe and Australia.
Diana Copperwhite, born 1969 in Limerick, studied at the Limerick School of Art and Design from 1987-92, received a BA in painting at the National college of Art and Design, Dublin and went on to do an MFA at the Winchester School of Art and Design, Barcelona.
Copperwhite is engaged with a sustained conceptual exploration of memory and abstraction. Using identifiable subjects, and sometimes drawing on media images, she plays with light and colour to create slightly unreal dreamlike and transitory compositions. The mood of her work is generally lyrical, creating an air of ambiguity of memories transformed in the unceasing passage of time. In a most unique capacity, she works over recognizable l images, working and reworking their surface and adding rich layers, so that objects are transported in an entirely new direction into a fluid visual quality of being remembered, actually reimagined in the most singular vibrant ways.
She has exhibited extensively in Ireland, including solo presentations of her work at Royal Hibernian Academy, Limerick City Art Gallery, West Cork Arts Centre, Highlanes Municipal Gallery, and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Her overseas exhibitions include Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France – in conjunction with the AIB Prize. In 2013 she started showing in New York and Miami with Thomas Jaeckel.
In 2012 she was a resident artist at the Josef Albers Foundation Connecticut, USA. She was a finalist in the Guasch Coranty Fundacio Painting Prize, Centre Cultural Metropolita Tecia Sala, Barcelona (2008) and was winner of the AIB Art Prize (2007). Her work is in public collections including: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, Aland, Finland. International Red Cross Netherlands, and private collections in the USA, Australia and Europe.
Judy Glantzman was born in Long Island, NY in 1956 and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She began exhibiting in the early 1980’s in the East Village art scene, at Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She followed with shows at BlumHelman and Hirschl & Adler Modern in the 1990’s and at Betty Cuningham Gallery for the past eight years. She had a 30 year retrospective at Dactyl Foundation in spring 2009. Glantzman was a Painting instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design and part of the drawing falculty at the New York Studio School. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Art Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; The Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH; and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most notably the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2001; the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Grant, 1997; the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1994; and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 1992. Glantzman lives and works in New York, NY.
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Recent publications include Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P/Distributed Arts Publishers, 2008) and Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010). In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art, School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007-2011) before he began writing regularly for the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
MICHAEL DAVID was born in Reno, NV, grew up in Brooklyn, NY and earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenhiem, the Jewish Museum, NY, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He is founder/director of Life on Mars Gallery, NY and co-founder of the new Hathaway David Contemporary in Atlanta, GA. David is classified as an abstract painter, best known for his use of the encaustic technique, which incorporates pigment with heated beeswax. He is also known for his works in mixedmedia figure painting, photography and environmental sculpture. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Edward Albee Foundations, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.