Anita Groener - New Work at the Rubicon Gallery

LAND – a new show by Anita Groener reviewed by Deirdre Conroy

Anita Groener’s recent work at the Rubicon Gallery is spare and pure.

Groener, who was born and studied in the Netherlands, has lived most of her artist’s life in Ireland. She has taken the complex work of Hieronymus Bosch’ The Ship of Fools (or the Satire of the Debauched Revellers) and The Conjurer, deconstructed their allegorical context, removing the faces of the revellers, appropriating their identities and creating an entirely new narrative. It is interesting that she chose images remembered from her student art history books, utilising the source of learning, engaging with replication and manipulation to produce a new meaning for the matured artist.

In Witness, her arrangement of the revelling faces, now a series of dots within their own circular motif, underlines the arbitrariness of meaning. The 15th-century hedonistic figures adrift from reason, have become part of a 21st century work; this transposition from one medium to another imposes a dialogue with history, interrogating the nature of human interaction with vice and folly and examining a 500-year old work in the context of where we are today. While the Late Gothic Mannerism of Bosch’s work is concerned with grotesquely representing human flaws and life on earth as an unending repetition of original sin, Groener abstracts that apocalyptic theme and rearranges it in her distinctive manner, translating it into a new language.

In other works she uses her mark on paper to convey systems of control, in Missing, Lost and Matrix, the dot or the line are not simply geometric ciphers. Interconnected lines become grids, grids contain tiny figures, the subtext of restraint, containment, entrapment is ever-present in the trope.

In 2010 Groener had a residency at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Her re-discovery of the work of Anni Albers during this time inspired her exploration of geometric pattern and the grid. Albers who was 95 when she died in 1994 is renowned as a textile designer and weaver, predominantly polychromatic geometric compositions; hers was the first ever show by a textile designer at MoMA in 1949. Groener found that Albers’ drawings were executed using the grid method and has interpreted that discipline as her own commentary on control and access, freedom to express and withholding of choice. Albers did not have access to painting classes in the Bauhaus and chose to concentrate and excel at weaving.

Where once the line between home and displacement was clear; history and the present were defined, Groener’s thoughtful and provocative images demonstrate a blurring of time and territorial boundaries in LAND.

The show continues until 19 November at the Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen’s Green
Images courtesy of the artist and the Rubicon Gallery.

New Sebastian Guinness Gallery on Dawson Street

Sebastian Guinness Gallery moves to Dawson Street and opens with a new show by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz: Liberation: Their Story Begins.
The Sebastian Guinness Gallery has moved from Temple Bar to 42 Dawson Street, built in 1910, its gracious portico has already welcomed many from the design and craft industry. It was the office of architects de Blacam and Meagher until the mid nineties and the spacious meeting room to the rear was the former atelier of Lainey Keogh. The room has been transformed, with the help of designer Brian McDonald, from a riot of colourful yarn and worktables into a pristine white space, perfectly lit as an exhibition venue.

The opening show by Wolfe von Lenkiewicz contains grand gestural pieces suitably epic for the main gallery and a series of densely worked drawings which line the foyer are redolent of old master Dutch and German engravings and convey the artists consummate skill as a draughtsman.

The gallerist and artist met at one of Von Lenkiewicz’s exhibitions in a disused bank building in London; no stranger to putting on shows in disused bank buildings, Guinness invited him to exhibit here.

Von Lenkiewicz’s work is inter-referential, paying homage to or parodying other forms of art. His depiction of Jeff Koons’ ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ piece is perhaps the most obvious and apposite. He manipulates Disney characters into deconstructed narratives, Snow White morphs into a skeletal quadruped, sagging under the weight of the seven dwarfs as Bambi stares in innocence. Traditionally innocent iconography is dismantled and exposed.

His references range from Velazquez to Bacon in ‘Portrait of Alice as Innocent X’ and his combination of Warhol’s Brillo with Lewis Carroll’s recumbent and seductive Alice plays on the advertising industry, the suggestion of the housewife’s submission to some hidden domestic bliss. He takes images we associate with fairytales, religious iconography, mythology and the old masters, combining them to produce a dark shift in perception, an unsettling reminder of the power of suggestion and the assertion that anything can be appropriated and redefined. These works are not just a chilling reminder of the manipulation of images, genres and the message; they are great works in themselves.

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz presently works in Berlin, He has exhibited throughout Europe in Maison Rouge, The Kunsthaus, Hamburg, the Palais de L’Iles, The Triumph Gallery in Moscow.

Knight of Glin

‘A Good Knight’: A Tribute to Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin (1937-2011
When I was studying History of Art in UCD in the early nineties, as a young mother with very young boys, one not yet in school, time was a luxury. There was only one great text on the history of Irish artists and it was out of print by about fifteen years. It was The Painters of Ireland by Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin. There was one copy in the library and there was no amazon.com. Finding time to get to the library let alone photocopy what I needed was a near impossibility. So, with some guilt at what we might forego, for the very princely sum of sixty pounds in real money, that book became my first great investment and my introduction to the breadth of knowledge and forensic investigations of two legendary collaborators.
Sadly, Ireland has just lost one of that intrepid team. Little did I realise then, that the Knight would be instrumental in many of my own forays into publishing. I was very honoured to be a contributing author on Painting Ireland, edited by William Laffan, based on the unique collection of Irish topographical views at Glin Castle.
Last weekend, in the beautiful village of Glin in county Limerick, his family, friends, fellow scholars and the people of Glin came from far and near to pay tribute to a stalwart defender of Ireland’s heritage. Desmond’s tireless campaign for the protection of our architectural heritage, the return of our great works of art and craftsmanship, and the publication of a body of work that is definitive on Irish art, architecture and furniture, singles him out as a hero of our times.
When I visited him in hospital recently he was surrounded by books and learned journals, his mind as lucid and enquiring as ever. He remembered the subject of my current research and whispered endless sources that I might follow. I confided that he was a character in my current book and it brought a smile to his face.
Glin Castle and gardens reflects the exquisite taste and earnest approach to conservation and restoration of both Desmond and his wife, Olda. He was generous in arranging tours of the castle and particularly kind when sharing his own knowledge and research; his library and study at Glin are a scholar’s haven. Villagers told me that Glin was where he loved to be, he was clearly held in very fond esteem locally for his work with Glin village. With all of his accomplishments and the honours bestowed upon him, his heart and pride was with his family and Glin.