Contemporary Austrian prints

ROUGHLY speaking, this is a companion piece to the Austrian paintings in the Hugh Lane Gallery, and some of the same names appear in it. For instance, Arnulf Rainer - currently Austria's favourite on the Biennale circuit - is presented by an elegant, small but uncharacteristically cool screenprint in broad, horizontal bands of colour, rather like the earlier work of Brice Marden.

One of the strongest personalities is Gunter Damisch whose large woodcut almost dominates the lower room; he verges on the decorative, but has an inner dynamic which lifts him above this. Georg Eisler shows an etched version of his familiar painting of the funeral of the long lived Empress Zita in Vienna in 1989.

One of the elder figures, Alfred Hrdlicka, is represented (ex catalogue), by a single work which is almost illustrative yet has a kind of Dostoyevskian power. Hrdlicka, though probably best known as a sculptor, is an acknowledged master in the print, and I would have liked to see more by him.

A fine nude by Eva Schiegel, the harshly elegant, black and white style of Leo Zogmayer, the quasi Expressionism of Gunter Brus, the technical finesse and sharp focus of Karl Korab are other elements which stand out.

Some of the other work tends to be rather obvious and illustrative, while a certain percentage is well made but slightly characterless, in a stock contemporary idiom. As so often is the case in group exhibitions, it is hard for the artists with the strongest individualities to stand out in full strength; democracy in art has its drawbacks.