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Past Exhibition > Michael Canning | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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14 February - 8 March, 2008 Michael Canning 'Paintings and Drawings'  Preview the exhibition
A 48-page full-colour catalogue is being published to accompany the exhibition. It's includes an essay by Yvonne Scott, and is published by Gandon Editions Kinsale.The exhibition will include a group of new paintings depicting hedgerow plants growing from a foreground hilltop earthen bank, above a patchwork of fields spreading out into the distance. His paintings appear at first traditional in composition, and almost Renaissance in execution, but behind this craft lies a strong theoretical understanding which gives the work a necessary contemporary resonance. In a style recalling botanical illustration, Canning's often melancholic paintings convey an atmospheric quality, with certain spiritual undertones. His canvases are strangely dream-like with soft amorphous horizons and limpid surfaces built up with numerous layers of oil and wax. Manifestly accessible, his work is thoroughly contemporary in its careful release and withholding of visual and conceptual signs. The artist has noted about his recent paintings; "My practice is as concerned with the manipulation of materials in order to question memory and experience as it is with addressing representation, classification, order, disorder, landscape and northern European painting heritage. I am interested in the transformative processes in the making of the work. Every action that contributes to the end image is loaded and part of a process of unearthing meaning from memory." Canning's paintings are built up in layers, using oil paint and wax, and sometimes ground earth, ash and soot. The end imagery is often related to preparatory drawings and 8mm films (rather than still photographs). The plants are rendered directly from observation. The paintings glass-like surfaces belie a history of struggle with the material and the image with changes of mind, corrections and amendments often visible. The artist adds; "I find these plants on daily walks near my home in County Limerick. The names of the plants are not important to me. Many of them I know by local names. Some of them are known to be poisons or remedies. Others have had traditional uses as fabric dyes or colourings. I often find plants I do not recall having seen before. When I'm out I'm not always looking for revelations, apparitions. I'm just looking for that which I feel I should have seen before, but never did." Michael Canning was born in Limerick in 1971. He studied sculpture at the Limerick School of Art & Design and the School of Fine Arts, Athens. He received his Masters Degree in Fine Art from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin in 1999. Recent exhibitions include Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, London; From Landscape, Crawford Gallery, Cork; John Martin Gallery, London, Éigse International Arts Festival, Carlow. He has exhibited with the Vangard Gallery since 2001. |
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Vangard Gallery, Carey's Lane, Cork T: 021 4278718 F: 021 4278719 E: info@vangardgallery.com |
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