Michael Cullen recounts how Berlin’s non-stop pace and intense cultural milieu drew Lorean O’Byrne to the cosmopolitan city in the 1980s
When Lorean O’Byrne arrived in West Berlin in the mid 1980s, there was still the feeling that World War II had recently ended. West Berlin was an exciting place to be. A party city that never slept with its bars open night and day. At the same time it was a city on the edge, in mute conflict with the symbol of its partition. The Wall. It had become a magnet for artists from all over the world. At one time it was said that there were more artists on the ground than spies. Berlin was a veritable city of the night, with its teeming demimonde. A world of sinister blacks shot through with kaleidoscopic primaries. West Berlin shone out, defiantly, against the unmitigated drabness of the GDR experience. It was a vortex of intense cultural activity – a large hadron collider of the arts searching for the ‘God particle’ in plastic form. This was epitomized by a group of young neo-expressionist painters, the Neue Wilde (New Wilds). They were considered to be the hottest thing in the new German painting of the 1980s, consisting of the painters Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salome, Bernd Zimmer and Elvira Bach amongst others. Their paintings, unlike that of the previous generation, were unashamedly subjective and louche, and although they might criticize what they saw, they did so in wild exuberant colour on huge canvases. Subjective thinkers, painting up a storm?
Was Daniel Maclise a proto-Nationalist painter? Peter Murray thinks not, in his assessment of the National Gallery’s recently restored masterpiece.
Christiaan Corlett looks at a valuable, but little-known portfolio of photographs taken by Victorian doctor Ephraim MacDowel Cosgrave, now in the collection of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
Vivienne Roche belongs to a generation who transformed what sculpture could be. ‘I don’t consider myself an object-maker. I work with place and change’, she tells Brian McAvera while her exhibition continues at the Royal Hibernian Academy