Oliver Comerford at Royal Hibernian Academy

Oliver Comerford

19/03/2010 - 02/05/2010

Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to announce a major show by gallery artists in the Royal Hibernian Academy, opening Thurs 18 March, 6-8pm.

Oliver Comerford will present 30 works from his career featuring paintings from the past 16 years, in this mid-career retrospective. Comerford's work has contributed significantly to the interpretation of contemporary landscape in Ireland. A representational painter, he presents a distinctive psychological space, often seen through the transient lens of a car window in motion. His images include outposts, remote or distant locations, coniferous woodlands and views from the edge of town. Comerford's images are at once perfectly recognizable as the world we inhabit, and at the same time charged with subtext.

“The paintings are, to a very significant degree, contemplative in mode — they show us spaces of suspense, but also of extraordinary, captivating stillness — and yet these unending journeys towards the edge of everyday life suggest an almost frenetic quest for calm: an unceasing and agitated striving, a hyperactive hankering for a setting, a sensation beyond the congested, contained conditions of urban existence. Given the back and forth between places and between ideas of place, and given the manner in which these images came into being (emerging from the movement between rapid, on-the-road photographic snapping and the slow, solitary graft of the painter’s studio) it is perhaps, ultimately, not those seductive points of rest, those lately pictured occasions of sublime stillness, but the enduring restlessness of Comerford’s painting practice that is most meaningful. Comerford’s art in this regard might be highly valued for the way that it alerts us to relation and analogy, to essential connections, rather than deluding us with dreams of escape. Here is an art that delights in the aura of places apart, but that quietly asserts the necessity of points between.” Declan Long, from the accompanying publication.

A 144-page monograph, published by the RHA with essays by Fintan O'Toole, Declan Long and a conversation between Oliver Comerford and Patrick T Murphy, will be launched on the night, priced at €20.
There will be also be 75 special, boxed, limited edition sets comprising a unique signed artist's monotype and numbered & signed book priced at €150.

The exhibition was featured on The View, RTE 1 on Friday 9 April. Click here to watch the clip. (Viewable with RealPlayer)

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