Stephen McKenna

Kerlin Gallery, Anne’s Lane, Sth Anne St, Dublin, Mon-Fri 10am-5.45pm, Sat 11am-4.30pm Until Oct 9 01-6709093 kerlin.ie

There’s something cheerful and cheering about Stephen McKenna’s paintings of cities made over the past few years. He’s visited a number of locations, on rivers or by the sea, and many of the resultant paintings are gathered together for this exhibition. Cities, notes the press release, “are an attempt by man to impose order on nature” and paintings are a way of ordering the chaos of a mass of visual impressions.

Certainly McKenna brings an almost utopian sense of industrious harmony to his pictures of metropolises.

He aims to convey “the underlying geometry of their construction”. As they appear in his compositions, they could be scale models, simplified and smartened up. But they are also very real, which undoubtedly has to do with the way he “observes the peculiar nature of the light or the air rather than landmarks as such”.

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Fifty Years A-Making

Solomon Fine Art@15 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin