Vanitas - Patrick Redmond
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 background, Redmond’s bubbles are also evocative of those iconic images of earth taken by the astronauts on the early Apollo missions to the moon, showing a blue and green sphere receding into the distance, reminding us so starkly of the fragility and isolation of the planet we call home.
Within each bubble, there is a cosmic quality to the kaldeidoscopic miasma of colour, like the supernova created by the core of an aging star collapsing in on itself.
The exhibition also includes a series of paintings of stuffed animals. The work of the taxidermist symbolises our vain and ultimately futile attempts to control nature and to arrest the passage of time. That split second between life and death is explored in the images of hunted animals with their slayers standing proudly in the background. Steam rises from the still-warm corpses of the animals, reminding us that only moments earlier they were alive, straining every muscle, every sinew to escape death. But as the vanitas artist has always sought to remind us, no living creature can escape death.
With unerring skill and directness, Redmond tackles a familiar theme with a contemporary sensibility and creates a body of work that is rooted firmly in a traditional mode of expression, without in any way being traditional.
Patrick Redmond was born in Wexford in 1976. He has had four solo exhibitions at the Molesworth Gallery and one at The Wexford Arts Centre. He has shown at the RHA Annual Exhibition in Dublin and the BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Gallery, London. He has also participated in curated group shows at the Iontas Arts Centre in Co. Monaghan and the Garter Lane Arts Centre in Co. Waterford.
View Larger Map
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 background, Redmond’s bubbles are also evocative of those iconic images of earth taken by the astronauts on the early Apollo missions to the moon, showing a blue and green sphere receding into the distance, reminding us so starkly of the fragility and isolation of the planet we call home.
 |
| Untitled (beachball II) ~ oil on canvas, laid on board ~ 41 x 51 cm |
Within each bubble, there is a cosmic quality to the kaldeidoscopic miasma of colour, like the supernova created by the core of an aging star collapsing in on itself.
The exhibition also includes a series of paintings of stuffed animals. The work of the taxidermist symbolises our vain and ultimately futile attempts to control nature and to arrest the passage of time. That split second between life and death is explored in the images of hunted animals with their slayers standing proudly in the background. Steam rises from the still-warm corpses of the animals, reminding us that only moments earlier they were alive, straining every muscle, every sinew to escape death. But as the vanitas artist has always sought to remind us, no living creature can escape death.
With unerring skill and directness, Redmond tackles a familiar theme with a contemporary sensibility and creates a body of work that is rooted firmly in a traditional mode of expression, without in any way being traditional.
Patrick Redmond was born in Wexford in 1976. He has had four solo exhibitions at the Molesworth Gallery and one at The Wexford Arts Centre. He has shown at the RHA Annual Exhibition in Dublin and the BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Gallery, London. He has also participated in curated group shows at the Iontas Arts Centre in Co. Monaghan and the Garter Lane Arts Centre in Co. Waterford.
View Larger Map
Comments
Post a Comment