Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith reflects on the constants within Charles Tyrrell’s practice as this uncompromising modernist prepares for his 40th anniversary exhibition in April
In the run-up to his latest exhibition at Taylor Galleries in Dublin, Charles Tyrrell seems bemused by the fact that it will open exactly forty years after his debut show at Project Arts Centre in 1974. That happened when the precocious young painter had yet to graduate from art school. Much has happened since. For one, Project’s relocation later that year to the stagnant inner-city quadrant we now know as Temple Bar heralded its gradual transformation into a ‘cultural quarter’, a process confirmed by the founding of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in 1983. By 1984, however, the midlands-born Tyrrell had quit the city for the relative isolation of the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, where he has lived and worked for the past thirty years. He has persistently cautioned against placing undue emphasis on this weatherworn landscape as a determining factor in his painting, whose tangled roots are still in post-war American abstraction. Yet he clearly cherishes the time and space this choice has allowed him to develop successive bodies of work at the pace they required.
In his assessment of Fitzgerald Kavanagh and Partners’ award-winning Student Centre at UCD Seán ó Laoire charts the evolution of Ireland’s largest campus since its foundation
Carissa Farrell reports on sculptor and multi-media artist Andrew Kearney’s new installation ‘Tell Me Something’ for Limerick City of Culture, which continues Kearney’s focus on the policing of the private individual
Without decisive action, our glass heritage will once again be lost, argues Eleanor Flegg, as Róisín de Buitléar’s exhibition’Caution! Fragile’ receives an enthusiastic reception Stateside