Gurrier
Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin
★★★★★
One of the first things you encounter on entering Mother’s Tankstation, on Watling Street in Dublin, is a wood-burning stove. Artworks, much like humans, are generally best kept at room temperature. Nonetheless, this pleasantly domesticating sight within the confines of a white cube feels particularly apt in light of the gallery’s current exhibition.
A group show drawn from the personal collection of the gallery’s founding directors, Finola Jones and David Godbold, Gurrier serves both as reflection on the 20-year history of Mother’s Tankstation and as something of a celebration of the art of collecting itself.
Along with artist, gallery and viewer, the collector is the final crucial element that enables the functioning of the commercial art market, bringing the liquidity in which the whole operation can flow.
It is both ironic and unsurprising, then, that, as is the case here, gallery owners themselves usually double as collectors. Collecting is always an investment and an expression of faith in the work. But with Gurrier we are reminded that galleries are frequently labours of love, driven by the enthusiast’s desire to live with and among artworks that have cast their particular spell.
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The homely feel is therefore arguably not a bug but a feature of the show. Both Overprotected Cacti (12cm) (2024), by Trevor Young, and Decomposition (2023), by Yuko Mohri, incorporate items of mid-century furniture. Untitled (2018) by Hannah Levy looks invitingly like a bar-stool of steel and silicone perched on bird talons.
High on a wall hangs Blursdays (Ed 1) (2020), by Yuri Pattison, a monitor displaying a clock that counts through the days of the week. Nearby, a cathode-ray television set on a low rolling plinth plays a short 2011 video work by Uri Aran in which a tea bag is dunked in a cup repeatedly.
Scattered throughout the space, each standing on its own small plywood shelf, are four fabric dolls made by Michael Dumontier, presumably based on drawings by his fellow Royal Art Lodge collective member Marcel Dzama.
A number of fine paintings also punctuate the show, including a wonderful 2007 oil-on-board work by Atsushi Kaga, and Army Knife (2024), by Matt Bollinger.
Mother’s Tankstation operates a second exhibition space in London, and a sibling show, Gurriers, is running there somewhat concurrently. Jones and Godbold are particularly committed to participation in global art fairs, which probably helps to bring a strong international flavour both to their personal collection and to their stable of artists more generally.
Numerous curatorial connections might be made between the various works on show, but, as with all good collections, the viewer is not wholly privy to the passions and obsessions of the collectors who gathered them.
As they say themselves in the accompanying text, “collecting and its attendant detail and histories” get into the bloodstream, and “the ‘collection’ expands beyond art, to books, furniture, glassware, ceramics, etc, every detail of daily living, essentially. Each artwork and object has a backstory and significance.”
As impossible as these all may be to unpick, there’s a distinct pleasure to be found in trying.
Gurrier is at Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, until Saturday, April 25th
