11th July 2024 – Exhibition

Mark Joyce’s new series of limited edition intaglio prints, Chromachord ( 2024 ) andBending Light ( 2024 ), explore the intersection of colour, light and form.

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His art delves into our optical and perceptual experience using colour relations and shape arrangements to dynamic visual effect. His practice is informed by a deep interest in the long-standing relationship between art and science, often drawing on mathematical and scientific concepts to develop his work.

Electronic Sheep is made up of multi disciplinary artists Helen Delany and Brenda Aherne based in London and Dublin, respectively. Their creative partnership began in 1998. The practice centres around textile art, fine art print and, more recently, film. They are known for their imaginary and historical storytelling through woven artworks where narratives draw on their personal lives intertwined with their local communities, highlighting the social, cultural and political everyday.

Electronic Sheep have produced a number of short films, sometimes in collaboration with other artists and filmmakers. On receipt of a culture award from One Kilburn Community Fund ( Camden Council, London ), they are in production on a short film in and about Kilburn, London, United Kingdom.

In 2022, the artists were commissioned by First Fortnight and The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon to make a new tapestry, Notifications Off, as part of the First Fortnight Festival, to open up conversations around mental health. The tapestry was exhibited in The Project Arts Centre, Dublin, during First Fortnight Festival 2023 and subsequently exhibited in London and Paris. The Kilburn Tapestries ( 2020 ) was the result of The Brent Award ( London ) 2020.  They were launched in 2022.

” Roof battens, truck tarpaulins, metal plates – the materials that Kirstin Arndt ( *1961 in Otterndorf, lives in Düsseldorf ) has been working with since the 1990s are industrially manufactured and familiar to everyone. In her minimalist yet expansive works, she explores the relationship between line, surface and space. ”  Galerie Mathias Güntner, Hamburg, in Piece of Cake #1 30.05 – 06.07.2024.

Damien Flood‘s recent paintings have taken inspiration from Edouart Manet’s 19th century flower paintings, created on his deathbed. These paintings are surprisingly full of life.  They are made with energetic, impasto marks which burst off the canvas. Recreating the bouquets brought to him by well-wishers, they are seductive and awe-inspiring. His limited mobility for the last months of his Parisian life meant that he was only able to paint directly from life.

The sense of urgency appealed to Flood. The previous artist was aware that he had no time for second guesses so they are a record of immediate observation.

Flood’s new paintings are fragile but bountiful. They are inspired by the vibrant, spontaneous, immediate intricacy of the older artist’s still life paintings. Flowers appear as virtuosic celebrations of a sensuous life coupled with ever-looming and inevitable death.

Niamh McCann‘s work has mined the signs and symbols of colonialism and local religious and cultural expression in her recent award-winning exhibition in Stable Arts Centre, Washington but first shown in the Rudolph Sharpf Gallery at the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany in 2022, called ” Hairline crack/A Dialogue ” and ” Someone Decides; hawk or dove “, curated by museum Director, René Zechlin.  Someone decides : hawk or dove finished its tour in a large 3-floor solo show in The MAC, Belfast in April 2024.   See Colin Darke’s May-June 2024 Critique in VAI’s VAN as follows :

https://visualartistsireland.com/critique-niamh-mccann-someone-decides-hawk-or-dove

McCann‘s neon Shhh…/ Fuar Anocht Beanna Boirche  ( 2023 ) is currently on view in Take a Breath, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, curated by Mary Cremin, until 17 March 2025.

Procedural Landscapes for Android ( El Capitan ) ( 2024 ) is a software-based generative video. It runs as an android app and uses ‘functional’ imagery to create a quasi-painting experience on a floor-mounted video panel.

The app. uses digital elevation mapping data to produce a 3D simulation of El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California ( also home to Silicon Valley ).  Our view is controlled by the random movement, rotation and focal length of a camera around the park. The topological height/slope data from the geological survey dictates what painterly patterns appear in what part of the landscape as the simulation proceeds through its day/night cycle. As such, we have moments where the camera view reveals an alien landscape of sorts, and other times when the view is animated colour fields and closer to 20th century painting abstraction.

Fergus Martin‘s last highly successful solo exhibition SMOKE recently finished in July 2024 in Green On Red Gallery, Dublin.   His work will next be exhibited at the gallery in The Armory Show, New York, 5-8 September, 2024.

Ongoing projects involve expanding the series of digital prints from the White Moons and Black Suns series exhibited in Lovers at Green On Red Gallery in February 2024. Martin is also collaborating with One Off Design, Dublin, on an animation project, Hay Bales, based on a sculptural idea of his.

” Recycled paper scraps that form a jumbled diary of a day are recreated by McCarthywith extraordinary precision and care using a variety of painting techniques. These site-specific paintings, you could say, record the consumables and the waste from a day inside and outside the studio, making the fleeting permanent and the inconsequential essential. They are monuments to survival. We immediately recognise the graphic detritus, the eye-catching brands, the routine post-it habits that are part and parcel of existence. ”  Green On Red Gallery, World, 2023.

McCarthy’s will exhibit her new paintings, video and works on paper next with the gallery at The Armory Show, New York, 2024.

Aoife Shanahan’s work is driven by a scientific interest in camera-less photography. She creates unique images, often utilising labour-intensive techniques stemming from the 19th-century origins of 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. In BioTrace she translates the unseen presence of bacteria into striking photographic abstractions. Initiated during the COVID-19 Pandemic, she exposed photographic film to bacteria, which feed on the particles of the film’s silver Gelatin emulsion, thus destabilising it. The resulting negatives are scanned and printed creating mesmerising abstract vistas, caught between photography, sculpture and painting.