Space and time
The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin has invited five international artists to respond to the gallery's space, in their own time. Billy Leahy reports
Suicidal ping-pong balls bouncing as carefree as lemmings into the O'Connell Street traffic was perhaps the most bizarre of sights this year. Declan Clarke and Paul McDevitt are the two artists we have to thank for introducing a table-tennis table to the middle of our city centre, with their public instillation piece 'Tischtennistisch', one of the more successful pieces of the recent Communism exhibition at the Project Art Centre.
Now the two have teamed up – despite their self-professed mutual resistance regarding their own individual practice – in order to pick five artists to interpret, engage and respond to the temporarily re-opened Hugh Lane Gallery.
Clarke and McDevitt Present is the first show in a series of temporary exhibition programmes at the Hugh Lane, which has been closed recently due to renovation works. So now seems an appropriate time as ever to invite five international artists, who have never shown in Dublin previously, to respond to the gallery space, the collection and of course, the Francis Bacon Studio.
For the exhibition, Clarke and McDevitt have chosen a broad and varied selection of artists to work within the space across their varied media. Northern Irish artist Matt Calderwood, German trio Cornelius Quabeck, Björn Dahlem and Sophie von Hellermann, and the rising London-based Ian Kiaer have been brought together for the project, importing a wide range of artistic language and media including video, instillation works, paintings and drawings.
The presence of the Francis Bacon Studio in the Hugh Lane underpins the exhibition, with each of the artists allocated a space in which to produce their work inside the gallery itself. Most of the works, as a result, are entirely new pieces and have been produced on site in the run up to the exhibition and, as a result, offer an insight into the processes of making art, much in the way that the Bacon Studio does.
Berlin artist Björn Dahlem starts with a direct interaction with the Hugh Lane space, building an arresting architectural wooden sculpture using the gallery viewing benches as a base. His work 'Hyperpsyche' – the title is spelled out in the space with massive polystyrene letters – also includes a video work containing paintings from the Hugh Lane collection cut and chopped in with footage of the universe.
Cornelius Quabeck has also directly assimilated the gallery's collection, hanging a pair of classic Irish landscapes alongside a painting of the Hellfire Club, while other works pay homage to guitarist Rory Gallagher, whom he has used as a contemporary point of departure. Sophie von Hellermann, a member of German art collective hobbypopMUSEUM, has taken a more personal approach to the exhibition, producing large-scale acrylic paintings centred around her 30th birthday, which took place during the installation of Clarke and McDevitt Present.
In Matt Calderwood's new work 'Screen', he presents an initially blank white DVD image; it soon transpires this it is actually plasterboard, which is removed to reveal an anonymous countryside scene. This gives the idea to the viewer that Gallery 5 is a physical obstacle to an intended destination, but through the artist's intervention, our initial reaction to the work is transformed and completely altered.
Ian Kiaer's contribution is probably the most remarkable, with constructs composed of paintings and found objects to create what he refers to as illusionistic, utopian and diagrammatic models, rather than installations. Influenced by the radical 19th-century theatre designs of Frederick Keisler, Kiaer's work takes the complex nature of how humans respond to their environment. That Kaier should be asked to respond to the specific environment of the Hugh Lane for this exhibition seems wholly appropriate.
?More Clarke and McDevitt Present at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Dublin 1, until 30 October 2005. www.hughlane.ie