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Primero
- 25 January to 10 February, 2007
Group Show featuring Sean Cotter, David Kiely, Siobhan McDonald, Robert O’Connor and Wesley Triggs
 Click here to preview the exhibition
The first show in the Vangard Gallery’s programme for 2007 is also a first for the artists taking part. Primero is an exhibition of five artists new to the Vangard and promises to be an exciting look at some of the most interesting work being produced by young Irish artists today.
Photographer Robert O’Connor; recently returned from a residency in Asia, presents a series of his surreal images of Shanghai and Hangzhou. His photographs give visual form to China’s urban transformation and industrial dream, literally juxtaposing the actual landscape and the futuristic building projects to come. Robert is currently artist in residence in the National Sculpture Factory in Cork.
Sean Cotter’s charcoal drawings are at once technically masterful and bleakly romantic. He describes the importance of the drawing process thusly; “The essence of a work can sometimes be caught more dramatically within the moments it takes to create a sketch. It can be frustrating and tedious work trying to recreate that snap of drama on canvas. Sometimes there is no point in going any further than a charcoal or mixed media drawing.”
Wesley Triggs is a recent graduate from the Crawford College of Art and Design, but in his two years as a practicing artist, has garnered much praise for his vibrant, abstract colour field paintings. His recent work has seen him introduce sheets of stainless steel to his canvases, the precise machine finish of which throws into sharp contrast his thick, boldly gestural brush marks.
David Kiely, born in Cork, but now living and working in Birmingham is a painter of eerily evocative landscapes. As with much of Kiely’s work there is an implied narrative. Many of the places and situations depicted are of a peculiar simplicity. There is an almost sinister atmosphere permeating from the paintings of anonymous buildings and landscapes void of people, which refer to the impact of the terrorist bombings on London in July last year.
Siobhan McDonald, a painter with several critically acclaimed Dublin shows under her belt; takes landscape as a starting point for her ethereal and luminous multi-layered paintings. Using a combination of Japanese inks, resins, bees’ was and oil paint she creates surfaces of relief and ambiguity, which reference the passing of time, flux and unrest.
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