CONTEMPORARY British sculpture is at the heart of the Weltkunst collection, currently on a 10 year loan to the IMMA. Besides sculpture, however, the collection also contains several hundred works on paper, a small selection of which turn up in the present exhibition.
The show is a modest effort, with just five artists (Allington, Kapoor, Gormley and Avis Newman) represented by a substantial number of works, but still offers intriguingly angular approaches to some of Britain's most prominent sculptors.
Antony Gormley's pictures are particularly distinctive, not only because blood and sperm crop up as media in one, but because of the way in which the artist translates his three dimensional concerns such as the fissures between mind and body into flashes of almost Blakian portent.
In Alornent, blood has been thinned down to form a maroon wash, across which falls a yellowed droplet of sperm. Perhaps this streamlined shape has just reached the head of a pen is or perhaps it is already hunting through the pink darkness of a uterus. In either case, Gormley confidently places dramatic focus on an everyday moment.
Edward Arlington is represented by a series of red ink drawings, executed on "used ledger paper". By rendering ornate architectural forms in an antique style the sketches are stiffly cross hatched Arlington paradoxically makes various chunks of plinths and pediments seem to disintegrate into a mist of lines, an effect emphasised by the hand written script that looms through the semi transparent shapes.
The scale of Bill Woodrow's huge untitled oilstick on paper image, in which a giant spoon nestles on a bed of tightly packed cells, adds a strong riposte to the tightly controlled works around him, while Greville Davey's Eye uses computer technology to create a slickly futuristic memento mori and Anish Kapoor's prints see the artist move forcefully into the shadow of Rothko.
Also included in the show is a set of prints, The London Portfolio, featuring several younger artists turning in work that leans ever closer to cheeky advertising. In the company of Michael Landy's Cor! What A Bargain!, a laminated red sign that apes cheap in store advertisements and Craig Wood's luminous green, enlarged detail of a supermarket air fresher, even Damien Hirst who offers a screen print in which various crystalline forms are arranged on a rigid grid begins to look a touch self serious.
