Niall Sweeney’s enduring friendship and working relationship with Panti manifests itself in an exhibition of 100 posters.
“The posters for PantiBar line up like a joyously demented assembly line in a doll factory.”
“Eyes, boots, bums, lips, limelight, bones and boobs — armed with a kit of parts, the posters for PantiBar line up like a joyously demented assembly line in a doll factory. Over the past 10 years, Pony’s voluptuous posters for Ireland’s most infamous landlady have become some of the most recognisable and iconic images around, not only within the gay community for which they were created, but reaching a much broader international audience.
They have been exhibited, published, collected and acclaimed around the world. They are clearly a labour of love, the result of a great friendship between the designer and the Queen of Ireland. But they also show that good work, and pleasure, can come out of the simplest of things: a poster for a drag show in the basement of a gay bar somewhere on the northside of Dublin — and how that, in turn, can become greater than the sum of its body parts.
From the very first poster made for The Panti Show, right through to the recent series that feature fabulous polysexual beasts, the posters stick to their guns in their use of rumbustious illustration”.
Making a Show of Herself – an exhibitionism of 100 PantiBar posters — a decade of design drag delirium boobs and booze runs at Panti Bar on Capel Street from Wednesday January 17th to Wednesday February 14th.
