It’s strange to think that it’s only in the past hundred years that female artists have become anything but an anomaly. Even more so that it’s perhaps only the last twenty or thirty that they’ve become a frequent occurrence in exhibitions and permanent collections. Female artists are probably still underrepresented, though, given the high number of female fine art graduates the last decade has seen; we can only hope this will correct itself over time. Perhaps the next generation of artists will be the first to see a total balance in the male and female artists to be commissioned by national collections, or to be given big solo shows.
And this generation looks promising: Lucy Andrews, who graduated in 2011, has been exhibited at the RHA, Project Arts Centre and The Model in Sligo amongst others. Helen O’Dea was one of the success stories of the 2012 NCAD Graduates Exhibition, being quickly snapped up by Monster Truck and Pallas Projects & Studios. Alice Rekab, Isabel Nolan, Aoibheann Greenan and Nina Canell are just a few more names that immediately spring to my mind when pondering talented emerging female artists based in Ireland, not to even attempt to make a comprehensive list.
Then there is the older generation. Alice Maher’s retrospective Becoming at IMMA was lauded by critics as the show of the 2012, championed for its intimate, often brutal exploration of the female body and its relationship with natural forms. Headlines were generated by confrontational works like Cassandra’s Necklace, a film piece in which our Cassandra wears a grotesque necklace of amputated tongues. It makes for a striking image. Dorothy Cross, Kathy Prendergast and Elizabeth Magill are a few more stalwarts of Irish contemporay art, well represented in Irish public and private collections.
So I’m not presenting a list of ten exhibitions showcasing modern and contemporary art by women to exclude male artists, whose contribution to the Irish contemporary art scene is made no less valid by this post. Nor is this week unusual in its bountifulness of female art talent on display: good art by female artists can probably be found in Dublin at any given point, and indeed, some of the items on this list are from permanent collections. But in the light of International Women’s Week, we figured it wouldn’t harm to compile a list of female contemporary artists that happen to be on show in Dublin right now. A list that’s celebratory in tone, not agenda-driven. So here it is.
1. Analysing Cubism, New Galleries, IMMA
Cubism may have been pioneered by that patriarch of 20th Century art Picasso, famed for his claim “I paint with my prick”. But in early twentieth century Ireland, it tended to be female artists that came to the forefront of Cubist success. Hot on the heels of their huge retrospective of Alice Maher’s work, IMMA’s Analysing Cubism show includes female twentieth-century pioneers of modern art Mainie Jellet, Evie Hone and Mary Swanzy.
2. The Hugh Lane
Women are well represented in the Hugh Lane, with works from Mary Swanzy, Dorothy Cross, Elizabeth Magill, and Nora McGuinness amongst the highlights of the gallery’s permanent collection. Tomorrow (March 8th) at 11am there will be a guided tour of the gallery focusing on the contributions of female artists in celebration of International Women’s Day.
3. Eileen Gray, National Museum
It’s well worth venturing to Colin’s Barracks for the Decorative Arts & History branch of the National Museum, where a permanent exhibition of Eileen Gray’s designs are on show. Largely inspired by the minimalism of Japanese art, the self-taught designer and architect became one of the most influential design figures of the twentieth century. Her slick Modernist designs and sumptuous black lacquer work still looks contemporary, and the National Museum’s exhibition illustrates both her illustrious professional and personal lives.
4. Alice Rekab, Vector/Attractor at the Goethe Institut
An mix of installation and film-based works mythologising a huge speckled pink and blue plastic ‘diamond’. It hangs opulently behind digitally printed drapes from the architrave of the Institut’s Return Gallery, mysteriously transforms and mutates in a video work in the Library, and is incorporated into a comedy sketch by Sierra Leonean comedy duo Stars Combine in the hallway. Rekab’s overlapping recofigurations and re-contextualisations of her ‘diamond’ playfully query the object of attraction and the context in which it exists.
5. ROTATOR, Pallas Projects
A fascinating exploration of the mysterious and historic landscape that surrounds the Pallas Projects site in The Coombe by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty. These two young Irish contemporary artists investigate the underground-flowing Poddle, the crypt of St. Michan, and a little-known artificial lake that neighbours the space, weaving their research with mythology and folklore to generate a compelling narrative. Tomorrow the artists will be screening films in their studio at Pallas – for more information see here.
6. When They Put Their Hands Out Like Scales, at the Copper House Gallery
One of the more overtly feminist exhibitions on the list, The Copper House Gallery’s When They Put Their Hands Out Like Scales bravely confronts the issue of abortion. Emma Campbell documents womens’ journeys to abortion clinics in an emotionally charged and intimate series. It runs alongside 10 Weeks, an exhibition by Leszek Wolnick that examines the harmful propaganda used by the Pro-Life campaign. Both finish on March 12th, so hop over there promptly.
7. Anita Groener and Vivienne Roche in RHA foyer/atrium
The RHA is home to several large exhibition rooms, and several large exhibitions. But sometimes its their most transient spaces that are used best. Currently, the Atrium and Foyer of the RHA house installations by Vivienne Roche and Anita Groener, respectfully. Roche’s Spirit and Light includes a colourful interplay of dichronic glass, beautifully manipulating the rays that pours through them in this light-filled space. Meanwhile Anita Groener’s State is a miniscule army of over 1,800 tiny plastic soldiers pinned into the wall. Opposite, dark clouds hover. It’s a somber meditation on the trauma of geopolitical displacement.
8. Prism by Aisling Conroy, Talbot Gallery & Studios
Opening tonight at 6pm and running until March 30th, Aisling Conroy’s Prism is set to examine faith and that old Romanticist concept of ‘the sublime’ through her canny manipulations of sensory experience. Colour, light, form and sound mimic the holy effects of religious art found in sites of worship, “creating abstractions of various models of sacred art, iconism and the veneration of ritualistic manifestations.”
9. Katy Moran, Douglas Hyde Gallery
The Douglas Hyde Gallery is apparently the place to catch internationally acclaimed female artists – Eva Rothschild, Nina Canell and Aleana Egan have all had exhibitions in the gallery in the past year, the latter two in the main space where Katy Moran’s show is now housed. Moran is an abstract painter and mixed media artist whose densely layered works in this exhibition are both bright and murky. Patterns, cut-off bits of fabric and faces from magazines emerge from beneath gestural strokes of paint, at once parodying mid-century abstract painters (and my, wasn’t Abstract Expressionism a very phallocentric movement) and creating something entirely personal. These complex works demand to be stared at for hours.
10. Monsters of Creation, The Women’s Museum of Ireland
You may have heard about the Women’s Museum that launched on Monday, you may have even read TD’s interview with co-founders Jean Sutton and Kate Cunningham. If you haven’t seen the exhibition yet though, it’s housed in Trinity’s Long Room Hub (a spit from the Douglas Hyde, if you fancy killing two birds) and explores the role women in education over the last century, taking its title from an 1869 Sunday Review writer who wrote that “a learned girl is one of the most intolerable monsters of creation”. Based around photographs, but supplemented by fascinating accompanying blurbs, we’re introduced to some of the first female graduates in Ireland and the way they paved for generations since.
