Every year, to coincide with Kilkenny Arts Week, the Butler Gallery has featured a major one-person exhibition by an Irish or international artist. The remarkable thing about these shows is that, at a time when even the big institutions were hesitant about bringing work by big name artists into the country, the Butler just went ahead and did it.
As a result, the roll-call is pretty impressive, and this year, to mark the festival's 25th birthday, someone had the bright, if challenging, idea of mounting a group show featuring a piece from as many of those artists as possible. There were obvious risks. What if some of them had hated the place and vowed never to have anything to do with it again? What if the show turned out to be a grade A mess? In the event, nearly everyone sent work (no sign of David Hockney or James Turrell), most artists turned up in person, and the show is terrific. Coherent as a unit, it boasts some superb individual pieces.
Visitors first. In British sculptor Bill Woodrow's superb bronze Listening to History, a larger than life reclining head is bound to a book by means of a blindfold. Woodrow made his name as a quick-witted sculptural recycler of household appliances. Here, taking a leaf from his book, fellow countryman Richard Wilson has spliced two filing cabinets together in Studio/General, creating a memorable image of compartmentalisation.
American Saul LeWitt has provided specifications for a beautiful wall drawing. Richard Long's ingenious, hand-drawn map of Ireland, as defined purely in terms of its rivers and lakes, provides a salutary reminder of the kind of summer we've had. David Nash's huge, enigmatic Palm Egg is a fine work from the innovative wood carver, and there's one of Ian Hamilton Finlay's carved mottos. Colour is provided by a group of outstanding painters. They include Gillian Ayres, whose Midnight Shout sets frisbees of thick pigment flying across a deep blue sky. There's a crowded, Beckmannesque allegory by John Bellany, revealing layer upon layer of narrative richness. Albert Irvin's Adelphi has the pyrotechnic brilliance of neon signs blazing on a wet night. Robert Andrew Parker's nocturnal account of Dering Harbour is an altogether quieter work, but it's beautifully observed and economically described. Alan Davie's strongly graphic Celtic Landscape is dominated by concentric circles and spirals.
Irish and Irish-based artists have not been neglected. Barrie Cooke, long associated with the Butler, shows a New Zealand river painting. Paul Mosse's works are nominally paintings, but the particularly fine example on view here is more than halfway towards being sculpture: a compelling assemblage of fragmented plywood and glass or perspex, paint and who knows what else, it is an intricately detailed world of its own.
Sculptures by Maud Cotter, Marie Foley and Eilis O'Connell are all small in scale but each is distinguished by its use of material, strikingly so in the case of O'Connell's strange, illuminated resin form nestling in an enclosing oxbow. John Gibbons's compacted steel The Book is rather sinister. Hughie O'Donoghue shows one of his dark-lit, ominous Rapido paintings, based on his father's wartime experiences. And Tony O'Malley, Patrick Scott and Camille Souter all put in a strong showing.
For the second year running, the James O'Donoghue & Co Gallery is in operation. Tucked away down one of the lanes that link High St and St Kiernan's St, the building was once Crotty's bakery and is currently owned by Paris Texas. It makes a wonderful exhibition venue, and not just in the sense of being a usable, makeshift space - it is a genuinely good space.
This year it contains the work of Swedish painter Rolf Hanson, who last exhibited here in Rosc 1988. Born in 1953, Hanson is based in Stockholm. Most of the paintings that make up his exhibition are from a series called Around the House. They are in part meditative recollections of a big, rambling house, set in several acres of land, where he lived "with his wife, child and dogs", until the sheer effort of maintenance became too much.
The rather blank, even forbidding facades of the house provide the dominant motif, set in a context of abstracted landscape. Hanson builds up complex surfaces in numerous layers, some opaque, some transparent, giving a strange, shimmering effect when seen close up. He uses astringent colour combinations and strong tonal contrasts. The paintings have an almost leisurely, hallucinatory quality. Sometimes the outline of the house comes across as an arbitrary, awkward imposition, but then to some degree the point is its very ordinariness, its status as an everyday icon. There is also a bonus. Downstairs in the same building, there are photographs taken by the artist. They are atmospheric, wintry landscapes, very Nordic in feeling. Their setting is remarkable, for they are hung amid the stacked debris of the old bakery, with heaps of disassembled machinery, wood, fixtures and fittings, all making an environment that is itself richly atmospheric.
The Scandinavian theme is picked up in shows at Rudolf Heltzel and Butler House. At the former, Birjit Birkkjaer's exquisite woven baskets and containers are made on a tiny scale and incorporate such materials as sticks, feathers, cork, pine needles and seeds. Anne Bjorn and Anne Marie Egemose at Butler House are described as textile artists, though between them they certainly stretch the definition of textile. Both incorporate unorthodox materials, including copper, rubber and paper, in their woven pieces, but always in a considered, inventive way, never for the sake of novelty. Egemose is no slouch with textiles within the letter of the law either, as her White Earth, a big diagonal grid suspended against the light, demonstrates. Bjorn's intensely coloured compositions are tightly disciplined and have associations with ritual. The School of Music, a regular venue, hosts three print exhibitions. There is a selection of superlative Old Master Prints from the Madden-Arnholz Collection at IMMA, including two of Hogarth's celebrated Progress series and works by Goya, Durer and Bruegel.
One of the finest contemporary Irish printmakers, Diarmuid Delargy, shows his Beckett Suite, made with a wonderful free-flowing line. Upstairs, etchings and monoprints from the Hope Sufference Press include impressive works by Matthew Radford, Anish Kapoor, Hughie O'Donoghue, June Redfern, Christopher le Brun and Therese Oulton.
South of Kilkenny, there is a small show of sculpture, including work by Elizabeth Frink, at Kells Priory. Nice as it is to see the sculptures sited throughout the remains of the priory, the place itself steals the show. I'm ashamed to say I had never been there before, and it is spectacular. The five- acre fortified monastic enclosure is the largest in Ireland, the setting is magical and the approach, via a footbridge over the King's River, is superb.
Most exhibitions run until Sunday, August 23rd, but the Butler Gallery show continues until October 11th, and Sculpture at Kells until August 30th. Paintings by Jackie Askew and Daniel McKeon can be seen at The Berkeley Gallery, Thomastown until September 14th.
