Sport

Whatever happened to the collapse of conceptualism?

IT may prove difficult, if not impossible, to equal the past year in terms of sheer activity and density of events

By BRIAN FALLON
Thu Jan 02 1997 - 00:00

IT may prove difficult, if not impossible, to equal the past year in terms of sheer activity and density of events. However, in Dublin at least, the future looks good; and outside the capital Kilkenny Arts Week, Galway Arts Week and Eigse Carlow seem set to maintain their recent standards.

And the trends? They were various, in fact eclectic, and though a few years ago observers were predicting the imminent collapse of conceptualism, this has not happened: if anything, painting continued to lose ground. The Turner Prize exhibitors in the London Tate included a painter, a video artist, a conceptualist and a photographer, and that mix is probably typical across the board. Meanwhile New York, like the Western Front, continues to be quiet.

In the Irish Museum Of Modern Art, a high level of activity has been maintained, and next year a highlight will certainly be the exhibition A Case For Painting, curated by the eminent painter Stephen McKenna. This will contain classic names - de Chirico, Balthus, Bonnard, Leger etc. It will be launched next summer and will run for some months. Late in the year, an Andy Warhol exhibition will open in the same venue and runs into February 1998. It will consist mainly of late works, and a selection of Warhol's drawings from the 1950s onwards.

IMMA is also collaborating with the Douglas Hyde Gallery in a dual promotion, called Scream And Scream Again, which deals with the theme of "Film in Art". The Douglas Hyde, in its own right, hopes to mount a Bill Viola exhibition late in the year; it also plans to show the well known conceptualist Richard Tuttle.

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Barbara Dawson of the Hugh Lane Gallery has various plans including a large exhibition of Swan Scully's works on paper, which will travel to Dublin from Oslo. The much travelled Basil Blackshaw retrospective, which opened originally in Belfast and later travelled to America, will open at the RHA Gallery in January. And, of course, the second leg of the posthumous Mapplethorpe exhibition will be on view in the Gallery Of Photography from early in January.

The big event at the Crawford Gallery in Cork will be the building of its new wing, which is due to start in June and will take at least a year. Peter Murray, while welcoming this and also the fact that the entire gallery is to be reroofed, points out that it will greatly restrict exhibition plans. And in Limerick, similar construction work is to start on the Limerick City Gallery.

Artist to watch:

Patrick O'Reilly - basically a conceptualist/installationist - made a strong impression in Galway Arts Week and (currently) at the Hugh Lane Gallery. The young painter Tom Climent won the Victor Treacy Award in Kilkenny in an entry which was fairly thick with talent.

This year's Must Sees:

1. A Case for Painting (IMMA)

2. Andy Warhol (IMMA)

3. Robert Mapplethorpe II (Gallery of Photography)

4. Scream and Scream Again (IMMA and Douglas Hyde)

5. Bill Viola (Douglas Hyde) 6. Basil Blackshaw (RHA Gallery) and/or Sean Scully (Hugh Lane Gallery)