Visual Arts: A Dream of Discipline (and other works), plus Lovers, Douglas Hyde Gallery and Gallery 2 until May 27 (01-6081116) Paintings, Gillian Lawler, Cross Gallery until May 27 (01-4738978)
The Douglas Hyde's A Dream of Discipline (and other works) is obliquely related to the Beckett Centenary Festival. That is, while the show, and the accompanying video installation in Gallery 2 - Lovers - could be described as the Hyde's contribution to the festival, they consciously come at it from left-field. The centrepiece is a sculpture by Kathy Prendergast, originally made and exhibited in the gallery in 1989, and a piece that, until it was recreated in 2006, no longer existed, having been broken up and dispersed in the interim.
The Hyde's strategy here is interesting in several respects, not least in relation to the position of the artist herself in the context of Irish art. While justifiably regarded as probably the leading Irish sculptor (if not, more generally, Irish artist of her generation), for most of her working life Prendergast has been something of a conspicuous absence on the Irish art scene. Based in London, she seems to prefer a distant, tangential relationship to the art world in general, though she has achieved a significant degree of acclaim at home and abroad (including a prize at the Venice Biennale).
Perhaps the word "reclusive" overstates the case, but it's not far off. Her low profile probably also has to do with the tenor of her work, which is in general quietly persuasive, understated and centred on themes of space, isolation, mortality and alienation, or what might be termed the strangeness of things. All in all, a good choice for Beckett. The more so in that A Dream of Discipline, a beautiful and enigmatic work, wouldn't appear out of place on the stage for a Beckett production. You could practically write the play around the sculpture.
A narrow mattress lies atop a heap of chalk boulders. The mattress is fringed with buckled straps. They might anchor it to the heap of chalk, but equally they suggest restraints. The title apparently alludes to a phrase by Seamus Heaney describing the austerity of a monk's bed. The image brings to mind the extraordinary perch of the monastic settlement on Skellig Michael.
Yet, in place of the sombre pinnacles of the Skelligs, everything is white, so that instead of the dominance of gravity over the precarious settlement, there is a dreamy, floating quality to the sculpture. The stones have the quality of clouds.
Sleep and dreaming are also evoked in another of Prendergast's pieces, After, a pillow from which human hair seems to sprout. The intimation of mortality contained in this work is echoed in Grave Blanket, in which the white marble pebbles commonly used in graveyards are woven into a child's blanket. There is a tenderness to these pieces that is underwritten by an awareness of the inexorable cruelty and tragedy of life. All of which complements Beckett's vision, but is quite distinct from it - none of his absurdist comedy, for example.
Prendergast's drawings of the rivers and, separately, the lakes of Ireland are emotional geographies that make the familiar strange, as do many of her works. So far we almost have a solo show, albeit one with a retrospective emphasis.
Works by other artists, Dorothy Cross and William McKeown, plus a piece from the Museum of Country Life, are also incorporated, but very much in an ancillary way. On the one hand, there's nothing that isn't incidentally interesting in its own right.
Cross's blackout video, in which a derelict rural cottage is engulfed by an expanding black hole, is striking, for example. Yet there is an oddly miscellaneous, diluted air to the overall ensemble.
Mark McLoughlin's video installation Lovers in Gallery 2 features a white van and a car abandoned side by side on a beach, slowly - very, very, very slowly - being either engulfed or revealed by the advancing tide; it's hard to tell which without devoting hours to finding out. The mismatched partners mired in the sand, facing the empty horizon is a recognisably Beckettian image.
Yet somewhere along the way it falls flat. Despite the promising mise en scène, what we see is actually insipid and drained looking. A tiny monitor view to the side manages to inject a bit of drama into the proceedings.
GILLIAN LAWLER'S SHOW at the Cross Gallery marks a significant return to form by a painter who has from the first looked very promising. An explanatory statement notes that her paintings are related to urban environments, notably the rapid transformation of Dublin in the recent past, but also drawing on visits to Mexico City and Istanbul. Where previously she looked at the imperative to make a space within the crammed urban context, now she is looking at the texture of that context in a more considered, reflective spirit.
That could be as reasonable a description of her concerns as any, but it's probably not a conclusion you'd jump to when you encounter the work at first hand. She has made a series of extremely well-judged, muted compositions that combine the play of amorphous textural expanses with various schemes of linear order. So it seems she is dealing metaphorically rather than literally with her urban subject matter. Admittedly, on several occasions she makes very effective pictures based on stylised representations of architectural structures, notably in the perfectly judged City Block or High Density.
Beyond that, though, her densely layered images tend to be more abstract meditations on the long-term rise and, it could be, fall of cities. Urban Mountains on stilts suggest vast though fragile ambitions.
There is more colour in this body of work than heretofore, though it is used judiciously. In particular, she has devised a consistent palette of muted greens, pinks and blues that has retrospective associations, harking back to Roman and even Egyptian art, and putting contemporary urban development in a historical perspective.
