Visual Arts/ Reviewed: Liam Gillick, Kerlin Gallery until Dec 16 (01-6709093) The Summer of 2006, Thomas Nozkowski, Rubicon Gallery until Dec 22 (01-6708055) Woodcuts and Etchings, Tom Phelan, Graphic Studio Gallery until Nov 24 (01-6798021) Winter Drifts, Margaret McLoughlin, Original Print Gallery until Nov 24 (01-6773657)
If you've never seen work by Liam Gillick before, you may be a little taken aback should you check out his show, Literally Based on H.Z., at the Kerlin Gallery. Make your way up the stairs and you'll pass under a decorative, ceiling-mounted piece consisting of panels of coloured plexiglass - a favourite material. The main gallery space is occupied by 10 identical high tables, each made from a reinforced eight-by-four sheet of MDF mounted on simple wooden trestles. They have a functional air, though you'd be hard put to pin down what that function is, exactly.
Perhaps the objects on their surfaces will provide clues: a number of geometrical constructions in coloured plexiglass and aluminium, and a couple of cryptic signs in painted aluminium. The signs and the structures point toward design and industrial connotations: Model for a House . . . , Slotted Production Structure, Model for a pavilion on the site of an abandoned car plant. We are told that the show's title refers to the fact that much of what we see, including the trestle tables, is derived from the input of Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig.
The press release elaborates further: the work is partly inspired by research on innovations in industrial production in Scandinavia in the 1970s, innovations that, it is argued, contributed to the migration of industry and widespread redundancies. Gillick imagines an erstwhile worker revisiting the abandoned or revamped site of progressive 1970s industry. Hence, presumably, the . . . abandoned car plant. It's all very oblique and provisional, but on the whole the installation lives up to all of these concerns fairly convincingly.
Since he graduated from Goldsmiths in 1987, Gillick has negotiated a curious, in-between position for himself. His work alludes to and draws on aspects of architecture, design, systems analysis, critical theory, cultural debate and more, all the while trying to avoid being pinned down within any category or genre. The state of definitive incompletion that characterises the Kerlin show is not only typical of what he does, it is intrinsic to what he does.
An energetic and persuasive talker, both literally and figuratively, he depends on keeping the discussion open.
If the stick is his penchant for parodically abstruse theorising, the carrot is the toy-like nature of many of his installations. With their bright colours and interactive nature, they are brashly attractive, and one feels that, theory notwithstanding, much of his engagement with spaces and materials - he is particularly fond of brightly coloured plexiglass - is essentially playful.
Thomas Nozkowski's paintings, in The Summer of 2006 at the Rubicon Gallery, are visual adventures, and they are difficult to describe. They could be termed abstract, yet in a sense they occupy a territory between abstraction and figuration and, more, each has an arbitrary but compelling logic of its own, so that getting a handle on one doesn't provide us with a template for understanding them all. Nor are there any titles to help. It is as if the artist has made a deal not to preclude anything, any possibility that opens up along the way towards the conclusion of a painting.
There is another element involved, however, and that is the avoidance of cliche or predictability. You could say that Nozkowski keeps trying to second-guess himself, making sure that he side-steps the conventions of any easily labelled style. Impossible, of course, but in the attempt he does avoid any hint of complacency and keeps himself on his toes. He also keeps us on our toes in our attempts to follow his pictorial manoeuvring. As the show's title indicates, he doesn't distance his work from his own life and the world outside the confines of the pictures' borders, but neither does he offer representations per se of a recognisable reality, even if we seem to be often on the verge of recognising something in any particular painting.
One effect of his methodology is that a single work will routinely incorporate stylistically or conceptually incompatible pictorial modes, disrupting our habitual way of reading a painting and prompting us to reconsider the way things are put together. Nozkowski is not unique in doing this, but he is particularly good at it, and it undoubtedly accounts in part for his popularity among his peers: he really is a painter's painter. This is his first solo show in Ireland and it is particularly welcome. Let's hope it's the first of many.
Tom Phelan is probably better known as an editioning printmaker and technician than as a printmaker in his own right. He has worked with numerous artists as part of the Graphic Studios visiting artists programme.
Because of the nature of the beast, it can happen that printmakers become interested to the point of obsession with subtleties of technique. While Phelan is clearly an exacting technician, and while the work in his exhibition of woodcuts and etchings at the Graphic Studio Gallery evidences considerable technical skill and ingenuity, he is also much more than that.
His work is outstandingly open-minded and adventurous. He takes repeat patterns, silhouette motifs and gestural marks and plays ingeniously with ideas of symmetry, balance and texture. He also has a sound and distinctive colour sense.
The Original Print Gallery features another fine print show in Margaret McLoughlin's Winter Drifts. Consisting entirely of evocations of the west Wicklow landscape in winter, the work brilliantly balances the demands of descriptive representation with free mark-making. Veils of mist and subdued lighting conditions are depicted particularly well in an exceptionally atmospheric series.
