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Fenton Gallery: Patrick Ireland - 27th April - 18th May 2006
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Patrick Ireland – Drawings from Four Series
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27th April - 18th May 2006
Patrick Ireland – Drawings from Four Series
One of Ireland’s most highly regarded artists of the 20th century, Patrick Ireland presents an exhibition of drawings at the Fenton Gallery. This exhibition will coincide wih his major retrospective at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.
Born Brian O’Doherty and raised in Mullingar, he emigrated to the US in 1957 where he became a leading art critic and an influential artist associated with the Minimal and Conceptual movements through the 60’s and 70’s. In 1972, as a response to the shooting of unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland, O’Doherty changed his name by deed pool to Patrick Ireland. Since this date all art work has been created under this name while his literary persona has remained separate.
“You draw to see what you’re thinking” is a typical comment from a Patrick Ireland notebook. What is the artist thinking about in this exhibition of recent drawings at the Fenton Gallery? He is thinking about primary words, flying open cubes and open books.
For thirty years, the artist reduced his visual vocabulary to three words: One, Here, and Now. Out of hatched filaments of hand-drawn coloured lines, each word rises like an hallucination. These drawings speak , but the accent – the drawings’ vocal cords as it were – varies with each line’s pressure, thickness, and character. With infinite patience, the drawings assemble themselves line by delicate line. Each line, says the artist, “is a thinking line”.
The cubes are caught in full flight, their six sides opening in different configurations. We are reminded that the artist is also the author of the classic text, “Inside the White Cube”. The cube, the solid certifier of three dimensions, is opened up to reveal insides, transparencies and a rich garden of angles. The open cubes are poised in a weightless no-place. The ear listens for the imagined “click” of each side snapping back in place to close the cube.
“Drawings Around the Idea of a Book” is an appropriate series for the author of several books. For everyone who has manipulated a book’s fan of pages, these drawings will be familiar. From the central spine, pages of different sizes, shapes and colours, open in an ordered sprawl, compressing the book’s three dimensions into two. These books can be “handled” by the eye, opened and, like cubes, closed in the imagination.
Drawing has been the deepest continuity of Ireland’s very varied art, the full range of which will be on view at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery from March. Exhibitions of his drawings have taken place at the Smithsonian’s Institution’s American Art Museum, at New York’s Clocktower, and at galleries in the U.S. and Europe. His work is in such collections as The National Gallery, Washington D.C., The National Gallery, Dublin, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Hirshborn Museum, Washington, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and numerous other public collections.
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- ONE
coloured inks on paper
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- NOW
coloured inks on paper
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- HERE
coloured inks on paper
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