• Brian McAvera
  

• TP Flanagan
  

• 
  Spring 2015
  Volume 32. No. 1

Arts Lives and Exhibitions
Brian McAvera
Exhibitions
TP Flanagan

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Until 20 March, Bonhams’ Dublin office is staging a large-scale retrospective of some seventy works by T P Flanagan (1929-201 I). Although the artist has been well-served in the North with a retrospective exhibition at the Ulster Museum in 1995 (which had a book-length catalogue co-published by Four Courts Press), as well as by more recent exhibitions such as those at the FE McWilliam Gallery and the Ormeau Baths Gallery (both 2010), not to mention an admiring assessment by Mike Catto in Art in Ulster 2, it is striking to note that equivalent assessments of this artist in the Republic arc noticeable by their absence. Despite being reviewed and interviewed regularly in The Irish Times and elsewhere from the 1970s onwards, Brian Fallon in his survey of Irish art in 1994 does not give him even a mention; Bruce Arnold awards him a mere four lines in his much reprinted historical survey; travelling exhibitions like ‘When Time Began co Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland’ (1999) and big, blockbuster style shows such as IMMA’s ‘Shifting Ground’ (200’1) ignore him. So with the recent publication of SB Kennedy’s biography, completed after the artist’s death (published in 2013), and now this exhibition with its attendant catalogue, we should be in a position to make a more detailed and rigorous assessment, especially as many of the works in the new exhibition, described as ‘landscapes of Ulster and Connaught’ have ‘seldom if ever been available for public view’.