Prizefight

FIVE artists have been short listed far this year's IMMA/Glen Dimplex Artists Award Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Mark Francis, Jaki Irvine and Alice Maher. On April 29th, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate ink London, will present the £15,000 cheque to the winner.

Meanwhile, each artist has been allocated good space in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and collectively they represent a range of styles and artistic personalities.

Of the five, Marina Abramovic, a powerful and multi faceted personality, is probably the best known, and she has shown at IMMA in the recent past. She exhibits a range of work a video in which a male figure apparently does very little except shiver like a swimmer who has dived into icy water, two wooden brooms with rock crystals for "teeth", connected with the always relevant idea of sweeping clean, and a kind of tall tripod in the corridor, in which the inverted "vessel" on the top is lined with more crystals, making it like a small cave or secret chamber.

No doubt there is much symbolism, ritual and other connotations here, but I admire Abramovic most in her own dynamic, on the spot participation, rather than in her more static artifacts.

Mark Francis, the only "straight" painter, shows spacious and quasi abstract canvases in muted, almost monochrome tones his motifs are simple and repetitive, including clustering, amoeba like shapes, organic squiggles and other shapes which rather suggest overblown pages from some medical textbook.

Janine Antoni has a sizeable reputation, but her contribution seems almost flimsy a photograph of a woman seated in an interior, some inscribed shapes on the wall opposite, giving (to me at least) an effect of inverted pretentiousness.

Jaki Irvine (the youngest artist on view, born in Dublin in 1966) is genuinely inventive and even absorbing in her multi media piece, which involves several simultaneous screens with the background sound of a Prokofiev waltz.

Alice Maher shows a series of paintings called Growth, each built around a strong, central image. These contrast with her bronze sculptures, Swimmers, five floor pieces whose theme is her favourite one of female hair.

Frankly, I have been disappointed overall in the previous, Glen Dimplex exhibitions, but this one has variety and solidity, and is certainly less pretentious and fashion conscious than in the recent past. The award itself seems to me an excellent initiative, but I had begun to fear that we might be landed with something in the nature of an Irish equivalent to the Turner Prize. And nobody in their proper wits, surely, would want that, no matter what nice, cosy, predictable "controversy" it might, stir up in the media who, of course, in such cases, generally bite on the bullet.