IT IS along time since John Burke has had an exhibition in Dublin, though work of his was seen in the RHA Gallery a few years ago. The pieces on view in the Hallward Gallery are smallish, intimate sculptures in painted steel and some of them are two-piece works, a tradition largely pioneered by Henry Moore. Moore, however, is not an influence in this case; we are dealing with Hard Edge abstract sculpture of a type prolific in the 1970s and since.

Burke's earlier work relied a great deal on a sense of diagonal thrust, but in the present show his vocabulary is much more varied. Circles and half-moon shapes are set against sharp oblique angles, vertical and horizontal tensions are stressed, corrugated motifs are employed, and wavy shapes offset by rigidly angular ones, etc. The colours are simply and sparely used, and put on very flat; for the most part they are confined to black, red and blue, as well as a dull reddish-brown.

I have always suspected that Burke is at his best and most authentic as a relatively intimate, even "domestic" sculptor; his big public pieces are competent and well conceived but without any strong individuality. On a smaller scale his good craftsmanship and clean, incisive sense of contour register strongly, and he also shows himself more inventive in shapes and permutations of shapes than I, at least, had remembered.

What is most reassuring about the exhibition is its consistency; certain pieces may be more individual or immediate in their appeal than others but none are weak or dully derivative. This is vigorous, intelligent abstract sculpture in an international idiom, comparable to the best of Michael Warren or Brian King; at times moving parallel to theirs, but on a different axis.