From big thematic group shows exploring topics as vast as time to small but beautifully formed solo painting shows, art in 2024 rewarded on many levels. On the painting front, artists at home and abroad proved that, once again, the medium is alive and kicking. It shone in shows by Mollie Douthit and Ciara Roche at the Butler Gallery, Zsolt Basti and Selma Mäkelä at the RHA, Patricia Burns at Taylor, and Eithne Jordan at Hillsboro Fine Art. War and end-of-the-world anxieties were also a feature, which is unsurprising given the apocalyptic times in which we live, but, again and again, artists expressed a sense of common humanity, implying that, just possibly, there may yet be hope. Here are 10 exhibitions and events that marked the year.
John Kindness: The Odyssey
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, December 2023-February 2024
What is it about The Odyssey that continues to inspire? From James Joyce to the Cohen brothers and, now, John Kindness, Homer’s epic from 800 BC reaches across time. Maybe it’s the whole thing about flawed heroes, getting stuck between a rock and a hard place, and not being able to outrun your fate.
[ Popping with colour, singing with ideas: John Kindness retells the OdysseyOpens in new window ]
Kindness married wit and inventiveness with found objects and his consummate skill as a painter to retell the story on everything and anything, including aprons, clothes pegs, old-fashioned underwear, metal panels and even traditional oil on canvas. His eclectic choice of materials underlined the message that heroic stories will continue to emerge from the substance of our everyday lives.
A Matter of Time
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, February-June
In advance of the Crawford’s closure to facilitate Grafton Architects’ major renovation and expansion works, artists got to grips with the nature of time itself. From poignant to provoking, Irish and international artists demonstrated the breadth of ways in which art can open our eyes to the wealth of those things that can seem too obvious to notice.
Kathy Prendergast’s spools of three generations of hair were gently beautiful, but her Ukraine, 2010, from her Black Maps series, shows how devastating the passage of time itself can be. Likewise, Rula Halawani’s For My Father series was made in 2015, documenting the – even then – transformed landscapes of her Palestinian childhood. Meanwhile, Yinka Shonibare’s 1998 Diary of a Victorian Dandy series riffed on colonialism, racism and othering. History repeats.
Els Dietvorst: Adrift
Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, March-May; Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council, October-November
While the Wexford-based Belgian artist’s touring show kicked off in 2023 at Drogheda’s Highlanes Gallery, 2024 gave an extended chance to see ambitious work spanning film, sculpture, drawing, large-scale murals, print and performance. Pilgrim figures crept in a series of sculptures across the gallery, as films and drawings explored aspects of the human condition, from migration to homelessness, and from craft and creation to making shelter and finding food. Underneath everything in this slow but utterly compelling burn of a show ran the story of a rich, deep and shared thread that links peoples across geography and across time.
Deirdre O’Mahony: The Quickening
Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, March-June
The humble dung beetle was the unlikely and unexpectedly beautiful star of the show in Deirdre O’Mahony’s installation, newspaper and accompanying film. Asking and answering questions about the costs of “cheap” food (and whether cows are the cause of our dreadful weather), and bringing the voices of farmers into the gallery, O’Mahony showed that we have been sold a pup when we’re told that the glorious complexities of nature are amenable to sweeping solutions imposed by short-sighted policymakers.
[ Deirdre O’Mahony’s The Quickening: the unlikely star of the show is a dung beetleOpens in new window ]
“Nature shrinks as capital grows,” repeated the refrain soundtracking a film that managed to avoid oppositional arguments. The film toured to rural halls around the country; it ought to be required viewing in schools everywhere. The Quickening is at Void arts centre, in Derry, January 11th-March 8th, 2025.
What Do We Want? Jill Gibbon, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Tom Molloy and Gail Ritchie
Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin, April-May
Since 2007 the UK artist Jill Gibbon has been attending arms fairs in various disguises: security consultant, war artist, buyer. Once there she makes sketches of the bizarre and chilling coalition of string quartets, cocktail frocks, champagne, missiles and tanks. She also picks up the branded sweets and grenade-shaped stressballs handed out at the stands.
Due to feature at the Olivier Cornet gallery, Gibbons’s sketchbook and “gifts” were refused entry by Irish customs. A slide show of the work was exhibited instead. The exhibition connected conflicts across time, and Gibbon’s work, particularly, was a vital reminder that many of the world’s largest economies, including the US, Russia, France, China and Germany, are weighted towards arms manufacture and trade, begging the question of whether they can really afford peace. The exhibition toured to Queen Street Studios and Gallery, in Belfast, in August-September.
Other Ghosts: Ursula Burke, Joy Gerrard, Jennifer Trouton
Ormston House, Limerick, May-June
Three remarkable artists showed together to great effect at Ormston House, in an exhibition referencing the “Ghost” leaflets circulated by Cumann na Mban in Dublin in the late 1920s as they saw the role of women being marginalised by the new Free State. Exploring the deterioration of civilised political debate, protest crowds and reproductive rights, the artists Ursula Burke, Joy Gerrard and Jennifer Trouton are each highly distinctive in style, and utterly persuasive in content.
Burke’s unravelling tapestries are a joy; Gerrard’s crowd scenes seem to gather resonance with each passing year; Trouton’s domestic scenes pack a coded sucker punch. Burke also showed to great effect at Crawford with These Fragile Monuments, in May, while Trouton’s In Plain Sight, at the RHA in September, gave space to the hidden stories of women in an exhibition from which it was hard to look away. Ursula Burke’s Siren (touring from Highlanes, Drogheda) is at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, February 22nd-April 27th, 2025.
Take a Breath
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, June 2024-March 2025
If time takes artistic space to measure, what about exploring something as insubstantial yet vital as the air we breathe? Covering topics from colonisation to racism, languages to war, environmental catastrophe to gentle meditation, Take a Breath features both food for thought and fodder for ire.
From Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s tracking of Israeli engines of war in Lebanon’s airspace, and Ammar Bourras’s documentation of the 1962 French Béryl nuclear-test catastrophe in the Algerian desert, to JMW Turner’s polluted sunsets following the 1815 eruption of Tambora, in Indonesia, breathing has proved to be a fragile privilege. Susan Hiller’s Last Silent Movie, tracking dying languages, is worth a return visit alone – which is fortunate, as the exhibition continues at Imma until March 2025.
Tino Sehgal: This Youiiyou
City Hall, Cork, June
When Cork Midsummer Festival got together with the National Sculpture Factory to bring the multi-award-winning German-Indian artist Tino Sehgal over, it promised to be a low-key but profoundly moving event. It didn’t fail. Anyone dropping in for a quick peek at parents and babies sitting on the Millennium Hall floor probably went off miffed and disappointed, but those who gave it time were rewarded with a slow-burning but richly affecting sense of being enveloped in primal sensations of care, warmth and love.
[ The extraordinary art of Tino Sehgal has to be seen to be believedOpens in new window ]
Half a year later, casting my mind back to the moment, those feelings remain. Sehgal famously prefers that his work not be photographed or filmed, so it really is a case of “you had to be there”, which is another way of saying that, if you get a chance to experience his work anywhere in 2025, don’t miss out.
Women Impressionists
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, June-October
Marking 150 years since the first impressionist exhibition took place, in Paris, museums around the world scrambled to put together their Renoirs, Pissarros, Monets and Cézannes in celebration. Focusing on Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Marie Braquemond and Eva Gonzàles, each of whom was integral to the story of the painting that changed the (art) world, the National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition was a study in reclaiming their legacy.
[ The forgotten women impressionists: Far more than models, muses or mothersOpens in new window ]
The exhibition also told a vibrant story of artistic friendships, and some betrayals too. It was fascinating to see abstraction edging into Cassatt’s work in particular, as if she couldn’t wait for the world to catch up with her talent, or with her brilliant mind.
Brian Maguire: La Grande Illusion
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, October 2024-March 2025
If we feel as if we are coming towards the end of days, and that apocalyptic forces are thundering in, Brian Maguire is here to remind us that it was ever thus. War, famine, disease and death have been the constant companions of humanity; they are joined in Maguire’s work by greed, violence, corruption and cartels.
The artist has documented such things at first hand throughout his career, and the cumulative effect at the Hugh Lane is astonishing, not least because of his phenomenal abilities with paint and his sensitivity to his subjects. A seeker of truth rather than artistic fame, Maguire nonetheless deserves a place as one of the leading, and most significant, artists of our time.
