Visual ArtsMick Cullen's show at the Taylor Galleries is big and ambitious, spread over four capacious rooms and two floors, and it is, cumulatively, dazzling in its reach and diversity, not to mention its sheer painterly bravura.
His is an art of autobiography, but with bold allegorical flourishes, not to mention his penchant for presumptuously identifying with such heroic exemplars as Velásquez or Picasso. The former turns up, figuratively speaking, in this show, and much of the work we see was made around or about Malaga, Picasso's home town.
Cullen also casts himself, playfully, as Marcello the painter from La Bohème, and in one extraordinary composition, he gives us a panoramic view of a production of the opera, complete with orchestra and audience. There is a party atmosphere to the painting, with its profusion of primary colours, and Cullen is generally good on fiesta, unfailingly observant and adept at capturing the mood in scenes of communal celebration and ritual. Early on, back in his student days, he worked in Spain and it clearly suits him. The brilliant light is embodied in lusciously thick white pigment, as in his evocation of a sprawl of white-washed buildings in Andalucian Village, Malaga, but he also likes its obverse, the impenetrably dark shadows that swallow up light and colour.
Stylistically, he veers from highly stylised, staccato arrangements of drawn lines and dashes to a much more naturalistic mode of description. Of these two modes, naturalism is better suited to his gifts. At their most austere, his hard, linear pieces can become calcified and brittle. Allowing himself to paint more fluidly and fluently, even using a spare, simplified language of form, he is tremendously expressive and vivid. His exhibition coincides with a new Gandon Editions Profile which provides a lavishly illustrated account of his output to date, with texts by Brian Lynch and Brian McAvera.
SWEDISH ARTIST LINA NORDENSTRÖM has been visiting Ireland since 1993, and has participated in several group shows, but Of books, boxes, prints and drawingsat the Original Print Gallery is her first solo exhibition in this country, and it is a substantial one for all its subtlety and understatement. Her work is so perfectly pitched and nuanced that you might file it under Refined and move on, but you'd be missing a lot. Most of what we see is based on maps and the idea of maps. They are starting points for Nordenström's imaginative journeys.
In tracing routes through cities, and in delineating blocks and swathes of buildings in terms of abstract forms, she is surely thinking about life as a journey and about the way we organise and make sense of things. Nordenström makes drawings and artist's books, and employs various print-making techniques, including an extremely accomplished form of collography by means of which she creates exquisite, rhythmic compositions in shallow relief. The exhibition allows us to trace the evolution of her ideas and techniques, and it is exceptional.
THE FINNISH ARTIST Salla Tykkä currently shares the RHA with Alice Maher. Besides her trilogy of films - Thriller, Lasso, Cave- that has been screened in Ireland previously and is, incidentally, essential viewing if you have not already seen it, the show also features a work made last year, Zoo, together with related still photographs. Tykkä has consistently focused on female, usually young female protagonists in a world where they do not necessarily feel comfortable, and which may be actively antagonistic towards their well-being.
Early on, this was graphically expressed in terms of boxing in Power, a short film in which a young, bare-chested woman spars ferociously with a much bigger male opponent.
The trilogy could be seen as charting the adolescence of a single protagonist while inhabiting her viewpoint. In Zoo, which has had a mixed reception, the protagonist is a young, assured looking woman. It is a heavily referential, highly stylised work. The actress, Terhi Suorlahti, is turned out as an icy Hitchcock heroine, and a disjointed, Hitchcockian soundtrack underlines the association.
Hitchcock's ambivalent attitude towards and treatment of his leading women is clearly evoked. Suorlahti carries a camera and makes her way through a wintry zoo that is deserted apart from herself and the animals. As she progresses, her composure evaporates as her attempts to take photographs are thwarted by her spontaneous visions of an underwater rugby match in which opponents, predatory amphibians, twist and lunge through the water.
It looks like an aggressive, masculine sport, though occasionally we see female swimmers as well. At times groups of players cluster around an individual like sharks at a kill. Symbolically, the underwater realm represents the unconscious and it seems reasonable to interpret the film in terms of the protagonist's efforts to take the initiative, to assert her own view, as being hopelessly compromised by her suppressed memories of earlier trauma.
In this reading, the zoo is society, a constructed environment in which instinctive ferocity and aggression is artificially contained, and the woman discovers that the security and personal possibilities it apparently offers her are bogus. And one would have to say that many women discover precisely that in contemporary experience.
Practically any documentary account of human trafficking, for example, tells a story of young women who think they are playing by the rules, only to discover that they are treated like so much rubbish by male predators, and that the rules were never devised for their benefit in the first place.
AT THE ASHFORD, in ". . . nothing without a woman", Mark St John Ellis has curated a very good, slightly abrasive show featuring work by six recent graduates, all women, that is largely concerned with images of femininity or female perspectives on emotional life.
It ranges from Genieve Figgis's beautifully painted, corrosive vision of celebrity glamour to Niamh Davis's Bruce Nauman-like exploration of declarations of affection.
Sarah Jayne Booth uses the image of a banquet table to suggest that there is something rotten at the core, that the image of perfection is always an illusion. Emma Turpin's photographs in Disroberuthlessly expose the construction of appearances. Piecesby Fiona Carey and Hannah Breslin are also compelling.
Michael Cullen: Mappa Mundi Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare Street Until Oct 20 Lina Nordenström Original Print Gallery, 4 Temple Bar Until Oct 26
Salla Tykkä: Zoo, Cave Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place Until Oct 28
". . . nothing without a woman." Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place Until Nov 1
