VISUAL ART:There's a much more impressive visual arts programme at this year's Galway Arts Festival than a first glance might suggest, writes AIDAN DUNNE.
THERE'S COMMUTING and then there's Varvara Shavrova's commute. It's not quite a daily grind, but it does take her from one side of the globe to another. During the summer each year she's in Ballycastle, a village on the coast of north Mayo, then it's back to Beijing, where she and her family are based for the rest of the time. Shavrova is a Muscovite by birth. In the late 1980s she moved to London and for the next 15 years or so was based there and in Ireland, establishing herself as an artist. Then, in 2005, her husband's work as an engineer brought them to China. Her exhibition Untouched,at the Galway City Museum, grows out of her experience of two very different environments.
They are vastly different but, she feels, they echo each other in odd ways and on deep levels. The video and photographic works that make up her show evoke two places and two communities. One is Ballycastle and its surroundings, the other a hutong area of Beijing. The population of Ballycastle is declining and the population of Beijing is growing, but growing at the expense of the residents of the hutong districts. The hutongs are networks of narrow laneways between and linking siheyuan, traditional courtyard dwellings. These low-height, low-density buildings are not compatible with the population pressures of contemporary Beijing. In fact, for several decades now the hutongs have been progressively demolished to make way for high-rise developments as the face of the city changes inexorably.
Shavrova’s photographs depict the walls and rooms of half-demolished buildings and courtyards in Beijing, and abandoned, derelict houses around Ballycastle. She also brings us inside the vacated rooms, with their various traces of human habitation. There is visual beauty in demolition and decay, and Shavrova relishes the textural richness of her subject matter. There is a difference in kind between the images from the two locations. In Beijing, everything is happening at an accelerated pace: the gashes and scars in the fabric of the city are fresh and raw. The houses in north Mayo are decaying more gradually, subject to a slow process of erosion, being incrementally reclaimed by nature.
The difference is reiterated in the scenes of life she records on video, interviews with residents of Beijing and Ballycastle in which busy, noisy vitality is contrasted with an elegiac sense of a depopulated, subdued, though still spirited community. Shavrova intends that we encounter her exhibition as we would negotiate urban and rural laneways. The black-and-white photographs, printed on a large scale, sit directly on the floor, back-to-back, arranged at angles to each other and we can wander in and out of spaces in which video and still images are projected. It is a thoughtful, richly textured, highly effective show, and certainly one of the highlights of Galway’s visual arts programme.
At first glance, and after last year’s double offering of Bill Viola and Joni Mitchell, the programme looked relatively low-key. Yes, David Hockney featured, but not with any of his recent, much publicised paintings. The festival gallery is showing the series of etchings he made in the 1960s inspired by six of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. It is, in the event, a brilliant show, surprisingly substantial, accessible and packed with felicitous detail. In his 1976 autobiographical picture book, he wrote that he started doing graphic work in 1961 while at art school because he’d run out of money “and in the graphic department they gave you the materials free”.
Graphic art became very important to him and he spent most of 1969 working on Six Fairy Talesfrom the Brothers Grimm. He's originally made some etchings based on Rumpelstiltskin in the early 1960s and wanted to return to the idea. In the meantime he researched the subject extensively, reading all 350 or so tales and looking at the work of previous illustrators. He identified 20 stories to illustrate and realised that was far too many, so the 20 were whittled down to six (though he says there are another six he would like to tackle as well). In the end he made about 80 etchings, of which 39 were published – they make up the Galway show. His approach is delightfully eclectic. Some tales he chose because they presented intriguing problems for an illustrator, including Old Rinkrank,which he opted for because of its opening sentence: "A king built a glass mountain."
On the other hand, he hadn't a clue how to illustrate The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear, but just knew he really wanted to try it. He made preparatory drawings but didn't just transfer them to the etching plates because he wanted to retain a sense of spontaneity. There's a wonderful, quirky humour to the images, which don't adhere to a single, consistent visual style but mix contemporary and ancient idioms at will, with direct references to Hieronymus Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci and other old masters.
PAINTERS SEAN COTTER and Ger Sweeney share a substantial space in the Festival Gallery. It's a propitious combination because they differ substantially from each other but work well together. Cotter's show marks an important step in his development. His paintings and works on paper are very free but delicately nuanced. When he builds up textures he tends to wander into Anselm Kiefer territory, which is risky for any artist. But when he sticks with thin washes and layers of pigment, hinting at things rather than spelling them out, he is much more vital and engaged. This body of work stems from a visit to Finland, and there are many references to landscape, but always in terms of passing atmospheric effects, of sideways glimpses, to great effect. Sweeney is an established, confident painter and the body of work he shows is called Notes from a Silence. The basic elements of his pictorial language are colour and light. He moves colour around, mixing, pushing, sliding and shaping it.
A feeling of space, and perhaps landscape emerges from this process, though he often stops us from settling too comfortably into any illusion of a pictorial space by abutting quite different expanses, areas that suggest mutually contradictory readings. It’s a way of keeping us guessing, of keeping our eyes busy, and it does.
Dolores Lyne’s show at the White Room Gallery is ambitious. She tackles the well-tried subject of the Connemara landscape with great freshness and wit. Lilly in the Lake is a boldly stated image of a dog standing in the water at the edge of a lake, gazing out across the water. It’s a picture with myriad associations in art history, most recently perhaps Peter Doig’s work. Lyne is admirably direct, even matter-of-fact in her treatment of imagery more often given a picturesque or sentimental twist. Her large paintings are particularly striking.
Norwegian artist Lars Laumann shows several video installations at the Galway Arts Centre, including the work for which he is best known, Berlinmuren. His often long, somewhat rambling videos are casual documentaries, and Berlinmurenrelates the unlikely story of Swedish woman Eija-Riita Berliner Mauer who realised in her teens that she was compulsively attracted to inanimate objects, that she literally fell in love with them. The love of her life is – or was – the Berlin Wall.
A new work, Shut Up Child, This Ain't Bingopremiers as part of this show. It recounts – slowly – the story of a relationship between a Norwegian artist and an inmate of death row in a Texas prison, in the 18 months leading up to his execution.
There is more worth catching as well, including the photojournalism documenting several conflict zones in Child Soldier, a vivid show in the Festival Gallery, Colm Hogan's sympathetic portrait photographs of west Cork Travellers at the City Museum, John Minihan's photographs of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett, plus a survey of John Kingerlee's paintings from 2002-2008, both at the Kenny Gallery, some highlights of the Absolut Art collection and John Brady's Gigantic Cart, both at the Festival Gallery, plus several ancillary shows at other venues. It is a much more impressive visual programme than a first glance might suggest.
galwayartsfestival.com
The festival runs until Sunday
