Mic Moroney guides us through the fabulous scenes created by Polish-born, Dublin-based artist Andrzej Mazur who is currently exhibiting at the RUA 135th Annual Exhibition
There is something deeply peculiar about Andrzej Mazur’s arresting, if often arcane images. His beautifully accomplished oils, many small and exquisitely detailed, teem with cryptic fragments of myth, Aesop’s Fables or Biblical tales; with a visual lexicon colliding Renaissance art and science with Baroque, Romantic, Symbolist, Dada, Surrealist and Catholic iconography. Hardworking and prolific, his tumult of imaginary landscapes are allegories mostly centred on the human form; often cowled or masked, resplendent or recoiling. With extraordinary facility he shifts styles – from the macabre, grotesque and apocalyptic to the fantastical, even sentimental – his Old Master techniques bolted to a free-ranging post-modern sensibility.
Mark Ewart visits the studio of Allihies-based artist Rachel Parry who transforms natural matter into mesmerizing art.
Kim Haughton’s portraits, on view now at the National Museum Collins Barracks, reflect on Ireland’s multi-layered society at the end of the first century of this nation state, writes Stephanie McBride
