Irish Art Scene

Creative Exchange Artists presents the second year of an outdoor gallery of nine billboards across East Belfast that celebrates the artistic exploration of the physical, visual and cultural expression of the area. The official launch and accompanying exhibition for the event will take place in Portview Trade Centre on the 20th of October 2011 from 6pm till 9pm. The artists whose work will be featured on the billboards in the area are Peter Richards, Cliff Brooks, Ray Duncan, Colin Davis, Ben Allen, George Robb, Katie Blue, Lesley Cherry and Deirdre Robb. This event is part of the Belfast Festival at Queens and is supported by Belfast City Council and the Arts Council of NI with sponsorship from Belfast Media Print and Design, Portview Trade Centre and James Brown and Sons.

Tattoo TV and White Lady Art are proud to present, "After Hours", Dublin's first independent tattoo art exhibition. It will show the fine art of tattoo artists, and the work of fine artists who are influenced by tattoo culture, from Ireland, the U.K. and Europe. The exhibition will include tattoo photography, erotic photography, drawing, painting, print and a special performance art piece on the opening night from Sharon Courtney. Sailor Jerry rum will provide free drinks for guests. Opening Reception: Saturday 22nd October 2011, 7 - 11.30pm. After party at Generator Hostel, Smithfield Square, 11.30 - 2.30 a.m. Tickets €10, or €12 including entry to the Generator club. Over 21's only.  Wheelchair accessible. On Show: 22nd - 26th October 2011. Location: The Complex, 18-21 Block C, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7. The gallery is wheelchair accessible. Opening hours for the show are 12-6pm. Featured Artists: Robert Hernandez, Oddboy, Gray Silva, Leigh Oldcorn

The Royal Dublin Society (RDS) is pleased to announce that it will build on the success of Art Fair 2010, with Art Fair 2011 RDS which will take place from 4-6 November 2011. In 2010, 130 artists and galleries exhibited and nearly 10,000 visitors came through the doors over the three days. All the information you need to exhibit is contained in the Application Pack and the Floor Plan. View Larger Map

The Annual Irish Polish Society Art Exhibition at 20 Fitzwilliam Place Dublin 2 continues until Saturday 22 October .   Exhibiting artists include Marta Wakula-Mac, Camilla Fanning,  Maciej Smoleńsk,  Orla Kaminska,  Martin Reynolds, Ula Retzlaff,  Deirdre Lennon , Helena Johnston , Marysia Harasimowicz  Roman Furgalski. The exhibition by Irish and Polish artists includes works in a range of media; oil, acrylic, print, drawings in pencils &, ceramics. It was included in the 2011 Culture Night Progamme and the current Dublin City Council’s Office for Integration ‘ One City One People ’ campaign (www.dublin.ie) The Exhibition is open afternoons on Friday to Sunday until October 22. Fridays: – 14th, 21st 12pm—5pm Saturdays:  - 8th, 15th, 22nd 1.45pm- 6pm Sundays: -16th Oct, 1pm-6pm For further information contact exhibition curator Marysia Harasimowicz at  marysiahz@gmail.com

VISIT 2011 is the initiative of eighteen artists’ studios in Dublin. On Saturday the 22nd of October, over 250 visual artists living and working in the city will open the doors of their professional practice studios for VISIT 2011. Ever wondered what artists’ studios look like? Curious to find out? View Visit in a larger map Art Base 9 N Great George's StDublin 1, Ireland Black Church Print Studio Block T 1 Haymarket Dublin 7, Ireland Brunswick Mills Studio 32 Brunswick St N Dublin 7, Ireland Broadstone 22 Harcourt Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland Fire Station Artists' Studios Ltd IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham Independent Studio Artists 11 Eustace St La Catedral Studios Monster Truck Studios Moxie Studios 6 Lower Ormond Quay Dublin 1, Ireland The Red Stables Market Richmond Road Studios 1A Convent AveDublin 3, Ireland Talbot Gallery Studios 51 Talbot St Temple Bar Gallery + Studios The Market Studio 250 + Art

Vanitas - Patrick Redmond October 13th ~ October 28th, 2011, Molesworth Gallery In his latest body of work created for a collaboration between The Molesworth Gallery and the Wexford Arts Centre, Patrick Redmond engages with the vanitas theme that has pre-occupied generations of artists stretching back through the Renaissance to medieval funerary art and further still to the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. Vanitas is a Latin word, meaning ‘emptiness’ and when applied to a painting is typically understood as work symbolising the meaninglessness of earthly or temporal - as opposed to spiritual - life. Typically, vanitas paintings have included symbols such as skulls, smoke, watches, hour glasses and decaying fruit to remind us of the ethereal nature of our existence. Redmond takes the theme and applies it first to meticulously-executed paintings of soap bubbles with all their connotations of the brevity of existence and the suddenness of death. Painted against a black back

The Surreal in Irish Art is the first exhibition to explore the influence of surrealism on Irish art. Presenting the work of over twenty artists, it features paintings and sculptures by well-known pupils of surrealism; pieces by artists who have engaged with the legacies of surrealism; plus work by artists whose practice has affinities with the surrealist movement. Originating in France in the 1920s, surrealism was a revolutionary cultural movement aligned with left-wing politics, and focused on challenging social constraints and exploring the unconscious. Although several of the leading figures were writers, the movement is best remembered for art works characterized by unexpected juxtapositions including Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, 1931, where clocks melt in a surreal landscape. F.E. McWilliam was the only Irish artist to be directly connected with the surrealist movement. He exhibited with the British surrealists in London, and the influence of surre

Naheed Raza A new exhibition by Naheed Raza at 126 Gallery, Galway October 5 - October 22 For her exhibition at 126, Naheed Raza will be showing recent film and photographic works arising from her micro-residency at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop between April-May 2011, which hint at the way sculptural ‘gestures’ might permeate culture, mediating many aspects of our experience. By considering activities involving highly physical, rapid and automatic gestures in the first instance and complex, painstaking ones on the other, the exhibition isolates moments of transformation and malleability in both art and the everyday. Naheed Raza's background is in both Art and Science, having initially studied Medicine at Oxford University before switching to Fine Art, first at Chelsea College of Art and then at the Slade. Much of her practice, which spans sculpture, installation and film, explores the limits of knowledge and ideas relating to haptic and tacit awareness –

John Millington Synge, Photographer An exhibition from Siamsa Tire featuring photographs taken by celebrated playwright J. M. Synge during his first visit to the Aran Islands. The exhibition consists of photographs which were taken in Connemara, Wicklow and West Kerry between 1898 and 1905. Synge had intended using these images to illustrate his account of life on the Aran Islands, but illustrations by Jack B. Yeats were used instead in the first edition. Yeats based many of his illustrations on Synge's photographs, most notably Yeats' drawing of An Island Man which was based on a photograph taken by Synge on Inis Oirr. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Siamsa Tíre in Tralee. The photographs are shown with the permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin. View Larger Map

A video profile of artist Willie Doherty produced for the channel 4 ideas factory website. Directed by Vincent O Callaghan and produced by the Nerve Centre. Willie Doherty: DISTURBANCE , Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 5 September 2011 to 15 January 2012.

Occupy Space is pleased to present Ubiety- a solo exhibition by Alan Crowley following his MA studies in Contemporary Visual Arts and Media at Limerick Institute of Technology. From an artistic perspective George Berkeley's theories concerning consciousness and the function of the mind are innovative and engaging. Copper plate etchings, polyhedron structures and a dialogue short represent ideas concerning the interval between what our senses tell us and how we cognitively function. The exhibition brings this unconscious intellectual activity before the public for their enlightenment. The Gallery is open from 1pm-5pm Wednesday to Saturday Ubiety runs until November 12th 2011. View Larger Map For more information please visit www.occupyspace.com

Manifold draws inspiration for her work from over-looked and often unbelievable subject matter such as rare delusional illnesses, obscure phenomena and manifestations of medieval melancholy, as a means in which to comment upon human consciousness in contemporary culture. The exhibition also reflects the artist’s fascination with the German ‘Wunderkammer’, or ‘cabinet room of curiosities’, private museums which date back to the C16th in which both the natural and the man-made were classified not by science but by the owner’s personal imagination and taste. In using this classification system as a vehicle, the artist presents her ideas upon hybridism and transformation, between both man and animal, and man and machine. Manifold’s cabinet of curiosities reads like a fairy tale, in which inanimate objects take on animal forms and preserved creatures are embellished like precious objects. Saturday 1st October to Friday 21st October.   Garterlane Gallery, O'Connell Street Waterford

When the hammer went down on Jack B Yeats painting "A Fair Day, Mayo" for one million euros this week its got the Irish Art Scene buzzing again as it became to most expensive work of art sold in Ireland. In times of crisis people look to the arts as a sense of National pride, take this sale and  the record numbers who were out in force for the Culture Night. Irish people are again looking for a national identity that had become lost during the recession. The recession has hit Ireland hard with the risk of losing its sovereignity. Culture in Ireland has always been an important part of society but during the boom is was watered down to make it fit into globalisation as Irish people looked outward with the roar of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland had become culturally lost which can be echoed in the presidential race where the candidates talk about supporting culture to build up Irish confidence in itself to get back on its feet economically.