CHRISTMAS group shows bare more rewarding than they used to be in the old days, when even the most reputable galleries seemed to be bringing up remnants from the basement, or else gearing themselves to the seasonable "nice small paintings" market.
The best painting here, I thought, comes from Stephen McKenna (fine, austere still life pieces), Felim Egan with elegant, sparely textured abstraction pictures, and Barrie Cooke. There are also good, understated monoprints by Mark Francis, gouaches by Richard Gorman, a Sean Scully woodcut, subtle black and white photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. A characteristically aggressive, expressionist painting by Brian Maguire and two small landscape canvases by Gwen O'Dowd add to the contrast.
Fionnuala Ni Chiosain continues her refined, soft toned, slightly immaterial brand of abstraction, while the single photograph by Paul Seawright is interesting for its scale and hard, close up focus. Elizabeth Magill has shrunk her work to minuscule size and I liked her two small photographs on canvas.
There are good sculptural or quasi sculptural works by Kathy Prendergast, John Kindness and Dorothy Cross, and a quasi installation piece by David Godbold involving a large wall drawing. Chung Eun-mo's cool, restrained but not bloodless abstraction is always rewarding even when it is not immediately eye catching.