Irish graduate shows: Hunt down great art while it is still affordable

When you buy a work of art at auction, it tends to have been valued by the test of time. Damien Hirst kicked off a fashion for auctioning new work with Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, his now infamous sale at Sotheby’s in 2008, but most pieces come under the hammer trailing provenance and context behind them.

Hirst’s sale was notable, not least because it took place the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed. He was the first artist to take a huge collection of his own works directly to auction, and the sale set records, raking in £111 million on the first night, 10 times the previous record set at a Picasso auction in 1993.

As a student, Hirst was already making waves. In 1988 he organised Freeze, an exhibition in London’s docklands that launched the careers of many of the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Sarah Lucas and Mat Collishaw, and caught the attention of collector Charles Saatchi. A year later another collector, German gallerist Karsten Schubert, called in to Hirst’s degree show and bought Bodies, a pharmacy-style medicine cabinet, for £600. Schubert sold it on to British collector, bond salesman Robert Tibbles, who held on to it for 30 years. In 2020 he sold the piece at auction for just under £1.4 million.

There is so much more to the value of art than its price. Still, stories such as this should lend a frisson to your browsing at the degree and diploma shows, which are in full swing around the country. This year’s graduating art students have had a tricky time of it, with lectures going online and colleges and studios closed on and off throughout the pandemic. From the quality on show at Cork’s MTU Crawford College of Art and Design last week, however, they have come shining through.

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Standout works include powerful photography by Aífe Horgan, and strong painting from Camilla Winquist, Rebeca Ajeigbe, Morag Ransley and Ronja Lagerqvist. It’s always interesting to wonder, as you explore the exhibitions, which artists will go on to have notable careers, and whose work might change, and in what ways, as the years go by. While you can try judging by eye, you can also be guided by the awards stickers, including the prestigious annual RDS Visual Art Awards, which takes place each autumn. Or you could follow the red dots. At the Crawford, Monika Kosmowska’s Itinerary series, delicate postcard-sized paintings of shelters in her home country of Poland, sold out at €120 each, and it’s easy to see why. Contact her via Instagram for more @eyes_of_providence.

Lockdowns made Ireland’s art colleges invest in pulling together their websites to showcase graduate work, so even though the Cork exhibition is now closed, you can browse the artists and contact them via crawfordshowcase.mtu.ie. Meanwhile in Limerick, LSAD’s exhibition, A Work of Art, is on at the Clare Street Campus until Sunday, June 12th.

In Dublin Works 2022, is at National College of Art and Design’s home on Thomas Street, and nearby James’s Street, until June 14th (ncad.works), while the graduate exhibition at IADT, Dún Laoghaire, On Show, is, ahem, on show from now until June 15th (iadt.ie).

Browsing the degree shows is fun. And while buying from them may not net you the next Damien Hirst (should you want such a thing), you can bask in the knowledge that you’re supporting emerging artists, at the most vital time of their careers.