With the arrival of the Fenton Gallery, Cork's already burgeoning visual arts scene has gained an elegant new exhibition venue. Conspiratorially perhaps, the healthy lustre of competition is in the air, with new developments, relocations and extensions vying for our attention.
The inaugural exhibition could hardly want for better surroundings, set perfectly against attractive internal finishings, and a beautifully restored exterior. And in these surroundings Dorothy Cross exhibits in Cork for the first time in 10 years. The collection spans this period and illustrates quite well her status as one of Ireland's most important artists. A contributing feature to this is the manner in which familiar imagery - a bed, cow's udders, rugby balls, lightships, crucifix etc - are placed into a bold and vibrant Modernist context.
Variously, the imagery is making statements about Ireland's cultural identity and its changing sexual and religious mores. The result is challenging and ultimately enduring. By turns, Charles Tyrrell's paintings speak a different language, using a quieter, more tentative brogue. The majority of the paintings are quite small and are worked directly onto square aluminium sheets. They are deceptively simple, a sequence of relatively anonymous shapes floating into view.
The earlier analogy to language seems quite appropriate here, as the series could be interpreted as a visual script similar to semaphore or emblems/ motifs belonging to a heraldic order. More accurately though, these "soft" edge abstracts are self-referential, the artist shunning artifice to explore intelligently the harmonious relationships between colour, shape and surface.
Runs until June 24th
