Despite the sheer, inevitable density, this year's RHA show is consistently interesting and enlivening, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.
The RHA Annual Exhibition has long been an exceptionally popular show. In artistic terms, an invite to the opening night is still the hottest ticket in town, and it usually does exceptionally well in terms of sales. In the recent past the academy has been undergoing a process of transformation, and this year's annual sees a convincing consolidation of that.
For example, although there are 481 individual exhibits, extending through every nook and cranny of the Ely Place building, and although as a rule of thumb quality is likely to be overwhelmed by quantity, there is proportionately a great deal of good work on view.
Besides which, the reach of the show, in terms of its artistic base, is widening year by year. Photography, cautiously admitted previously, gets a fair showing this year - look no further than Amy O'Riordan's dazzling Self-Portrait with Carousel, which is both extremely well made and thoroughly contemporary, two qualities close to the academic heart. O'Riordan's brilliantly conceived, composed and designed image is an effective riposte to those who might cavil that photography is out of place in the academy largely because anyone can, these days, click a shutter release and come up with something presentable.
For it is true that there has to be a limit to the academy's inclusivity, otherwise it will simply lose any chance of finding and maintaining a coherent identity.
Just what the general shape of that identity might be is persuasively and carefully argued by a relatively recent arrival to the ranks of academicians, painter Stephen McKenna, in an essay in the catalogue. He says the academy is first and foremost an artists' organisation and must stand for a level of technical and manual proficiency in the designated fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and photography. He also implies that a broader theoretical background, including a level of cultural literacy, is also important. However, for various reasons, these qualitative criteria are not currently rated highly in the art world, where meaning and its interpretation eclipse form.
But it's not simply a question of stepping into the breach, McKenna says. If the academy is to be an effective "counterweight to the banalities of official culture", and not revert to being "a laughable anachronism", the membership and the work must be of the highest quality and, he says bluntly, "at present they are not".
That may seem harsh, but it is accurate, and given the gains made on both counts, it is encouraging he doesn't opt for easy self- congratulation.
The academy is an obvious marshalling point for contemporary representational painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, something long realised by such artists - and academicians - as Conor Fallon, Martin Gale, James Hanley and Michael O'Dea. We have seen spirited and innovative approaches to representational art by Irish artists over the last 10 years and more, and there was a danger that, apart from the commercial galleries, a great deal of this kind of work had no natural home, because it is inconsistent with the "official culture" McKenna refers to.
So it's good to see artists such as Colin Harrison, Aidan McDermott, Colin Martin, Alice Maher, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Blaise Smith, Elizabeth Magill, Stephen Loughman, Gary Coyle, Oliver Comerford, Simon English, Geraldine O'Neill, Michael Canning - not to mention McKenna himself - exhibiting. In various ways, the work of these artists attains levels of psychological and technical complexity that usefully tests the traditional limits of academic art. But it's equally important that more senior academic exhibitors, whose work is everything that it should be and more, are not muscled out.
This year, T.P. Flanagan, for example, shows three excellent small oils, and Barbara Warren's Ballinakill Bay is outstanding. And many other artists, including Anita Shelbourne, John Coyle and Peter Collis, are valuable presences.
It should be noted that there is also a logic to the presence of essentially abstract artists such as Paul Doran or Makiko Nakamura, whose work is extremely well made and cogently argued. Some observers may tend to class other artists as abstract even though their work relates to aspects of representational tradition. Artists, that is, such as Colin Crotty, Eamon Colman or Bob Lynn. Landscape is always central, and there are fine landscapes by Jacqueline Stanley, Mary Lohan, Eithne Carr, Campbell Bruce, Bernadette Kiely, Geraldine O'Reilly, Jim Savage (the latter two are responsible for two of the best drawings in the show), Nancy Wynne-Jones, William Crozier, Barbara Rae and Janet Pierce.
Among the printmakers, Catherine Kelly, Cora Cummins, Janet Preston, Valerie Hannan, Lars Nyberg and Pamela Leonard show strong work. As do sculptors Gerard Cox, Natalie Delimata, Walker and Walker, Sonja Landweer, Graham Gingles and Olivia Musgrave. There is fine photographic work by Stephen Farrell - his view of a lift and landing in a Ballymun tower block is a remarkable piece of urban realism - Ruth McHugh, Anthony Hobbs, Tracey Staunton, Anna Rackard and Amelia Stein. The exhibition includes tributes to four academicians who died during the last year: the painters Tony O'Malley and Richard Kingston, and architects Noel de Chenu and Neil Monahan.
With so many individual exhibits, it is inevitable any review will degenerate into a list of names. Those included here by no means indicate everything that is worth seeing in what is, despite the sheer, inevitable density and the risks of exhaustion, a consistently interesting and enlivening show.
The Royal Hibernian Academy 173rd Annual Exhibition is at the RHA, 15 Ely Place, Dublin, from Tuesday until June 28th.