Artist of the Month: Sinead Ni Mhaonaigh

From Kevin Kavanagh Gallery website...

***images and writing © Sinead Ni Mhaonaigh & Catherine Leen, respectively***

Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh: Eatramh

Intervening time or space, interval or even lull in weather are all translations of the resonant title of Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh's second solo show, Eatramh. This title explicitly links her latest exhibition to her previous one, Deoraíocht, which featured a painting of the same name. Eatramh marks an important departure from the first show, however, which was based on the literary source of Pádraic Ó Conaire's Scothscéalta and its theme of exile. The importance of the space in between has expanded in Eatramh to become an exploration of the medium of painting itself.

For Ní Mhaonaigh, the desire to capture space, time, emotion and experience cannot be neatly captured on a canvas, with the result that her works are suggestive rather than representational. There is a suggestion throughout of flux and a strong sense that the journey towards an image, rather than the creation of a fixed, specific representation, is key. The works Stage I and Stage II capture the notion of an event about to take place through unpeopled spaces that seem precarious and delicate without their customary activity. Similarly, Platform conveys a sense of expectation and unrealised drama.

Despite the artist's refusal to take recourse to the creation of easily identifiable forms, the works do not reject the allure of painting. Ultimately, Ní Mhaonaigh's sensitivity and skill combine to create a unique style that blends the language of painting with the performative and the philosophical.

- by Catherine Leen

2006A catalogue with an essay by Catherine Leen has been published to accompany the exhibition. For further information please contact the gallery. Title: Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh: EatramhISBN: 0-9552525-4-7

Favorite Artist of the Month

America's Rembrandt.
Anybody read Eakin's Revealed? Makes you kinda wish he'd stayed hidden if all the conjecture is to be believed. Seems he was inappropriate to say the least.

Favorite Artist of the Month

Gillian Ayres (British, 1930)

Ayres decided to become a painter at the age of fourteen, and studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946-50, before running the AIA Gallery with painter Henry Mundy whom she married. During the entire period of her maturity as an artist she has produced abstract paintings of strong individual flavor owing both to European post-war abstraction and to American Expressionism. The former influence came indirectly through her meeting with Roger Hilton when he was experimenting with free abstraction. Of equal importance were photographs she saw of Jackson Pollock working on his paintings on the floor, which encouraged her to work without brushes and with physical movements unlike those of conventional easel painters.
In later years she continued to develop her almost instinctive approach to color, especially when in 1978 she turned from using acrylic to oil. In recent work she has sometimes continued to apply the paint until the surface gives way under the strain, but the colors retain their brilliance and individual quality.
Gillian Ayres' first solo show was at Gallery One in 1956, although she featured in many key group shows thereafter, for example Whitechapel Art Gallery's seminal British Painting in the 60s in 1965. Her solo shows however, are an impressive list: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1981; Serpentine Gallery, 1983; the Tate Gallery, London (1995) and the Royal Academy in 1997. She has taught at St. Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art and was made an RA in 1991. Ayres's work has been exhibited in many group exhibitions in countries throughout the world since 1957, including France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, USA and Japan. She continues to exhibit regularly at Gimpel Fils, London and at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London. Gillian Ayres lives and works in Cornwall and London.