Gallery Visit – Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.

On the 21st of November 2008, we visited The Hugh Lane Gallery to view the exhibition “Now’s the Time”. Curated by Padraic Moore, this exhibition presented works by 11 artists, all of whom unfortunately died at a young age, but who all created memorable works of art which still resonate with audiences today.
The exhibition was impressively displayed. There was plenty of space left between each piece, so that they could be viewed separately, and without leaving the viewer with the feeling that the space was overcrowded.
The work on show included many different mediums such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography, silk-screens, video work and installations. The work on show was displayed across five large spaces. The first room had works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The second space displayed a piece by the Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The third space showed work by Michel Majerus, and Martin Kippenberger. The fourth space displayed pieces by Gordon Matta-Clark, Eva Hesse and Piero Manzoni with the final section showing the work of Bas Jan Ader, Helen Chadwick and Jason Rhoades.
Many of the artworks were large in scale with works by Basquiat, Haring, and Majerus taking up whole walls of the gallery space separately while other works (for example the series of drawings by Martin Kippenberg) were very small by comparison.
My favourite works in this exhibition, both in terms of layout and artistically, were Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Sauna Piece” and “Office Baroque #669”, and also Keith Haring’s “Aids 85”.
There were titles placed beside each work which was very informative and to-the-point. Information given included the names of the artist and artwork, the date they were completed and the mediums used to create it.
My only complaint about this exhibition was that there was no leaflet or catalogue available to us containing information about the pieces and the artists who created them.
Seeing as the main premise of this exhibition was that all the artists were deceased, I thought that some information about their backgrounds and artistic practices would have been helpful. We were given an enlightening talk by the shows curator Padraic Moore but if we hadn’t had, I would have known virtually nothing about the work on show.

DL







Now is the time. Time of the day, time of the year. Time to contribute to an art world a little and time to pay our respect to a man who founded Hugh Lane Gallery- Sir Hugh Lane himself who died on a board of RMS Lusitania at the age of 39. Because this time was and is rather tragic. The show about its consequences and for some of us it is kind of a journey through time. And it should be, starting from a point of Basquiat's pop influential drawings and finishing at modern conceptual art.
On November 21st I visited the gallery, early enough to make my way to the second floor, have a look around and take some notes. I found myself in a large and tall room, number 1 (17 in the actual gallery plan) with five large artworks surrounding me. Basquiat and Haring. At first I felt llike I was back at school, chalk, blackboard, basic figure drawing and colours. Then I held my head in surprise. "Sweet Jesus", I thought. AIDS, bones, blood, pain. This is not school. This is a mirror that reflects a sense of being in the present time and unfamiliarity with the world. It's expression was a request of social awareness.
Fully prepared for more surprises I passed the disappearing work of Felix Gonzales-Torres. Personal messages were written and painted on 30 canvases by Majerus to room 3 (15) with Gordon Matta Clark as well as 2 others to finish my journey in the last room. I found a more poetic and romantic approach to art that I would imagine to find from modern artists. I stood mesmerised.
Since Padraic E Moore, the curator, told us that the exhibition arrangements are more random within the time frame and not that important in this case, I began to wonder why were those particular pieces chosen. Are they a very significant part of an artists career? Something that we should know and take examples from? No. Maybe because they talk about time passing gradually leading us to death but they also all made a similar statement: nothing lasts forever, not things nor lives. Like Torres had requested that the audience participate in proving the fact that one day his artwork would be gone or like Eva Hasse decided to work with fragile and breakable materials.
All of those scenarios were written in a memorable matter and this show has put together all its diversities in a very clever way. It was a great opportunity to purely appreciate different mediums we are yet to explore painting, drawing, sculpture, intervention, performance and video. I have noticed that each room represented different matters that are overlapping each other a little, fear and drama, vanitas attributes, peculiar perspective, flimsiness (of subjects like body, mind and objects) and a modern romantic approach to components of human needs, urge and desire (in some with visible irony and critique).
For "Now's the time", It really was The Time.

natalia

Now’s The Time concentrates on a number of artists whose lives were cut short prematurely but whose work continues to exert influence upon artistic practice today. Artists featured include Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Bas Jan Ader, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Helen Chadwick, Michel Majerus, Martin Kippenberger and Jason Rhoades

Artists' forum

http://www.stealingtulips.com/

An Irish art website and forum created to unite young Irish artists so they can share ideas, job information and artwork. Worth checking out.

-Aisling.

The Tate Channel

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=tate

in the name of research

www.twomb.com

natalia

Critique of group 4's presentation on the Tate Liverpool

From our collective critique of our presentation on the Tate Liverpool, we in group 4 came to the following conclusions about how we could improve our professional practice work in the future;

* Not enough personal insights and opinions. While we unanimously agreed that our collective works were well researched and thorough, we believe that our presentation could have benefitted from the addition of our own personal opinions regarding the Tate Liverpool and the work presented in it rather than merely facts and flat material.

* Some members of our group argued that there was a lack of proper preperation between us and that we could have made more use of rehearsals to fine tune our presentation and calm our nerves.

*Similarly, the group agreed that we should meet together more for our next presentation as we found the lack of cohesion between us in some areas caused our speech's sense of fluidity from each point to the next to suffer.

* Finally, we found that we often bled into eachothers' chosen topics when writing our respective parts of the presentation. As such, some of our entries were either too specific or far too general.

Overall however, we were pleased with our presentation and believe we gave a well researched, informative look into the Tate Liverpool as a whole.

-Aisling