VOLTA 6 | BASEL

Diana Copperwhite / Paul Nugent / Mark O'Kelly / Ulrich Vogl

16/06/2010 - 20/06/2010

With support from

culture ireland | cultúr éireann

promoting the arts abroad 
cur chun cinn na n-eadaíon thar lear


Mark O’Kelly
Mark O’Kelly’s glamorously coloured paintings are the outcome of a practice of image research which exploits the space between photographic document and the cosmetic image. Providing a critique of the exchange relations inherent in the spectacle of the painting exhibition, his work selfconsciously pictures large epic spaces, the grammar of which invoke the erotics of cinematic narrative. In addressing the reciprocal voyeurism and poetics of display, his painting’s, vitrines and installations implicate the viewer’s complicity in the construction of sensational social values and ethics. He has recently exhibited in Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2010; The Black Mariah, Cork, 2009 and Institute
of Contemporary Art and Thought / N National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, Athens 2008.


Paul Nugent
Paul Nugent’s paintings weave back into history to explore ideas about memory,
veracity of representation, the use and proliferation of imagery and the place of painting in contemporary representation. What the paintings tell us is that memory is not just a repository where we store things we might want to revisit for pleasure but also the place where the ghosts of history, benign or otherwise, hover, like the negative waiting to be printed into something positive, like the images that emerge from beneath the surface in Paul Nugent’s paintings. He has recently exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, 2010 and Kerava Art Museum, Finland, 2009.


Ulrich Vogl
The technique of drawing is at the core of Berlin-based artist Ulrich Vogl’s oeuvre. Using
a process-based and analytical approach however he takes this technique into new spheres: drawings in the classical sense – works on paper – are the exception. Instead, his works are mainly films, objects or installations. While Vogl’s overall topic would be the “extension of drawing”, his focus of the past three years has been on “drawing and light”, working with shadows, reflections, movement and drawing. Many of his works are playful and interactive, creating its own magic without ever hiding the simplicity of its creation.


Diana Copperwhite
Combining site specific wall paintings and collage with drawing and painting, Copperwhite
is interested in making work that plays with space, interior and exterior, psychological
and physical. “Like portals between two worlds abstraction and figuration or reality and imagination, her works are like half remembered dreams evoking a sense of what could exist beyond the visual.” Skye Sherwin, 2009. Recent shows include Collecting
the New, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and The Marienbad Palace, The Highlanes Municipal Gallery/Droichead Arts Centre curated by Jacqui McIntosh.