Fusion of Heritage & Modernity

Callum Innes creates abstract paintings that carry a powerful tension between control and fluidity. Over the past 35 years, the Scottish artist has developed a completely individual approach to painting that explores all the myriad possibilities of the medium. Central to his practice is the idea of dissolution: the artist builds up dense layers of colour before applying turpentine to sections of the canvas, dissolving paint to reveal the lush, poetic colours and textures contained within its pigment. Repeating this process of painting, dissolving and repainting multiple times, Innes builds depth and a sense of history: oblique panels of dense pigments become embedded and fortified, while tiny trickles or rivulets of liquified paint point to their underlying fragility.

One of the artist’s signature bilateral paintings, Untitled No. 2 was made through this meticulous process of addition and subtraction – dividing the picture into two contrasting but harmonious picture planes: one which is pristine, and withholds colour and light, the other which is full of luminosity and texture. Though abstract in appearance, Innes’s paintings draw inspiration from the colour and light of landscape, in particular those of Scotland and Norway, the two countries between which the artist divides his time.

Andy Warhol was an American visual artist and film director considered a leading figure in the pop art movement of the 1960s. He is known for his iconic repeating images of Campbell's soup cans, meticulously painted but visually embodying the mass produced feel of consumer goods. Warhol’s artwork has also revolved around celebrity figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and, as featured above, Jackie Kennedy.

Warhol’s screen print, Jacqueline Kennedy III (Jackie III) from 11 pop artists III, is based on press images that the artist collected from the newspaper announcements of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The photos in the work show Jacqueline Kennedy’s facial expressions before and immediately after the death of her husband. Warhol’s use of a close crop captures the facial expressions of joy, as well as utter misery and shock, frozen in time. In depicting these shifting emotions out of the larger context of the event, on a surface that is completely flat and monotone, Warhol leans into abstraction in a technical sense as well as in an emotional sense. These works are intentionally presented to maximize their abstraction, a transformation that the viewer can also have an active role in. As Warhol notes, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away.”

Damien Hirst is a British artist whose wide-ranging practice includes installation, sculpture, painting and drawing. In his art, Hirst explores the tensions and uncertainties at the core of human experience. Love, desire, belief and the struggle of living with the knowledge of death are all investigated, often in unconventional and unexpected ways.

Hirst is perhaps best known for his Natural History series of works which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde. These iconic sculptures aim to recast fundamental questions about the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. Science and our unquestioning faith in the power of pharmaceuticals remains one of Hirst’s most enduring themes. Consistently challenging the boundaries between art, science and religion, his visceral, visually arresting work has made him a leading artist of his generation.

Honesty (H9-5) is one of a set of cherry blossom works by Hirst from a series entitled The Virtues. Referencing Impressionism, Pointillism and Action Painting, the Cherry Blossoms in Honesty are about the spontaneous joy of spring. Hirst said “Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme –– there’s something hopeful yet hopeless about them. They’re art but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process love and why we need it, but also these prints are about the momentary, the insane transience of beauty – a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear blue sky. How can you argue with that?.”

Dorothy Cross examines the relationship between living beings and the natural world. Through sculpture, film and photography, the artist stages unexpected encounters between plants, animals, body parts and everyday objects, resulting in strange, hybrid forms that range from the lyrical, sublime and meditative. Cross achieved international recognition in the 1990s for a body of work which saw her incorporate cow’s udders into uncanny, surreally-inflected sculptures – one of these works, Virgin Shroud (1993), is in the collection of the Tate in London. Continuing this series, the photographic diptych Silk (2000) presents a pair of cow’s teats protruding through antique silk panels. Hiding in plain sight behind sumptuous embroidered silk, these body parts are suggestive of a playful eroticism and sensuality, but also of our primal need for nurturing and care, reminding us of our closeness to animals.

This sense of mutability between humans, animals and nature is a driving force in Cross’s work and is also evident in the photographic self-portrait Overlap (Merge) from 1991. Asked to produce a work for the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Cross laid two negatives over one another: one depicting her own body, the other showing that of a dogfish, an aquatic creature related to the shark. Cross is a keen scuba diver, having trained as a competitive swimmer before becoming an artist – she even narrowly missed out on qualifying for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Depicting herself in a diver’s stance – arms poised upwards, ready to launch herself into the water – this self-portrait demonstrates the artist’s desire to access the ocean, its transformative power, and the interconnectedness of living beings. Cross’s Foxglove series, initiated in 2007, also fuses the human body with the natural world. A plant indigenous to the West of Ireland is cast in bronze – a delicate process, requiring precision and grace. Except all is not as it seems: in Cross’s sculpture, the plant’s distinctive ‘bell’ flowers begin to morph into human fingertips, resulting in strange, hybrid forms that fuse the creativity of the human hand with the generative power of nature.

Cross lives and works in the windswept and rural region of Connemara, on Ireland’s rugged West Coast. She often uses the raw materials of her environment in her work, gathering materials found washed up on the shoreline, from old boats to whale bones. She also photographs the Irish landscape with great sensitivity to the changing conditions of seasonality and light. Glassilaun Snow Peak (2014), for instance, is taken from the sweeping expanse of Glassilaun, a white sandy beach in Connemara, looking towards the snow-capped peak of a nearby mountain ridge. Soft clouds graze against the tip of the mountain, reflected in the shallow waters below and suggesting a sense of harmonious flux between sky, land and sea. Other works see the artist position herself within the landscape. In Erratic (2007), the artist’s outstretched arms and legs mimic the

stance of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man against the backdrop of a giant bolder. The rock is an ‘erratic’ – a rock that has been swept along and deposited by a glacier, and therefore differs from the nearby rocks in its environment. The artist sees the erratic as a huge natural sculpture, created by dramatic shifts in the landscape. Her stance positions the history of art against the geographically sweeping shifts that span long before it. In Cross’s Foxglove series, initiated in 2007, a plant indigenous to the West of Ireland is cast in bronze – a delicate process, requiring precision and grace. Except all is not as it seems: in Cross’s sculpture, the plant’s distinctive ‘bell’ flowers begin to morph into human fingertips, resulting in strange, hybrid forms that fuse the creativity of the human hand with the generative power of nature.

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish born installation and mixed-media artist based in Berlin. Working across these various disciplines, he is interested in investigating moral and ethical questions, mental and physical states, as well as ideas of collective memory and selfhood. Using literature, pop culture, folklore, and cinema alongside his own drawings, writings, films, and videos, he conjures powerful, often disorienting manipulations of time and language that have been exhibited and collected by museums worldwide.

Instruction (Number 3C) is an intriguing and intimate artwork by Gordo, consisting of a single sentence: “From the moment you hear these words, until you kiss someone with brown eyes.” The words are applied to the wall as a vinyl text and can also be heard on a telephone, installed in a secret phone booth. The phone call was one of the first techniques that Gordon employed to communicate his text works, with recipients left wondering about the source of familiar if affecting statements. The piece is marked by a romanticism characteristic of the artist: reflecting on the effect of this work, Gordon has commented “I always liked the idea that words, which are supposed to be concrete, when spoken

Elizabeth Colomba is a French artist of Martinican descent, now based in New York City. Drawing on European Old Master techniques and sensibilities, Colomba’s incredibly detailed and rich paintings reclaim mythological, historical, and allegorical narratives from the long standing legacy of portraiture. Her love of storytelling from a young age carries over into her paintings of today, placing and lauding the Black figure into a pictorial narrative tradition, from which it had been historically omitted. Through a revised and reclaimed form of portraiture, Colomba’s work redresses the erasures of women of colour across the canon of art history.

Nonchaloir was created for Vogue U.S. Magazine’s December 2023 issue, when Colomba was invited to engage in the conversation between contemporary fashion and fine art. Using a blue dress from designer Christopher John Rogers 2024 collection as the starting point for inspiration, Colomba imagined an expanded scene in which the dress would figure. In the work, a black female protagonist is portrayed in a scene that fuses old worlds and the contemporary into one rich genealogy of objects whose complicated stories invite the viewer to consider history from more than one angle. For instance, a Louis XVI stool from Italy lies at the sitter’s feet, reupholstered in a print recognisable as one of Rogers’ own fabric patterns, while a porcelain chocolatière from 19th century Vienna at once refers to both the glamour of high society’s sweet indulgence and the inextricably damaging history of cocoa, a delicacy exported by exploitation.

Seen in a wider context, fine art, like fashion, has seen the Black figure relegated to obscurity, to the outskirts of history. Colomba’s practice draws the Black figure into the spotlight, to be seen in full splendor, reclaiming control over representation. Reflecting on her approach, Colomba has stated, “By generating an environment for my subjects to inhabit a space that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time allows me to redefine not only how black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves.” As such, the protagonist of this work informs its title Nonchaloir (‘Nonchalance’), encapsulating her power –– a quiet confidence, an inner strength, a self-assuredness and elegance. 73

Guggi (née Derek Rowen) works with drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media. The Dublin-born artist presents lyrical, contemplative representations of household objects, bestowing humble, everyday vessels with emotional resonance and meditative beauty. Guggi continually revisits these familiar forms in a manner that is intimately contemplative.

Guggi and his nine siblings were brought up under a strict, disciplinary, and fundamentalist Christian father and a hardworking, kind-hearted mother who nurtured his love of drawing and painting from a very early age. Together with his childhood friend Paul David Hewson, more popularly known as Bono from the band U2, Guggi founded and sang vocals for the legendary avant-garde goth/post-punk band The Virgin Prunes. The band’s renowned live performances utilised Guggi’s artistic skills though their embrace of performance art and painting. After the band disbanded in 1986 Guggi turned to painting full-time.

Numbers V comes from Guggi’s Numbers series, a collection of works inspired by the visual form of Russian language and numbers. His ethereal compositions are softly mysterious, but as the artist claims, they are not meant to be “cryptic puzzles.” Instead Guggi is fascinated by the idea of counting and accountancy, and dismantling context
and order in exchange for something more visually poetic.

North Atlantic Ocean, Martha’s Vineyard, is one of a series of photographs that comprise Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes. Sugimoto is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores sculpture, performing arts production, architecture, and photography. His artistic approach is both self-reflexive and investigative of the world around him. Themes of history, time and metaphysics are explored, as seen distinctly in his Seascapes series.

In an interview with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Sugimoto explains how the inspiration behind Seascapes came to him at a very young age. He describes his earliest conscious memory, driving with his family through a dark tunnel. Upon leaving re-emergence to the far side, his eyes met the brilliant horizon line of the sea –– an image that remains seared in his memory. Since then, Sugimoto has photographed seas around the world, each image composed of equal parts air and water split by a horizon line. The result of this composition is a peaceful timelessness that emanates a strong spirituality towards the viewer. This visual tranquility embodies Sugimoto’s own feelings: “Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”

In reflecting on the series, Sugimoto explains that what fascinates him about the image of a horizon is its status as a universal landscape, uniting people throughout history. In speaking about the dangers of capitalism’s ceaseless consumption of our limited natural resources, Sugimoto states, “In order to face a failure likely to happen in the near future, we should see once again the seascapes that the ancients saw to revert us to our innocent minds. So my work hopefully gives us an opportunity to think before destroying ourselves.”5

Angela in Orange by Isaac Julien, a filmmaker and installation artist who currently lives and works between London and California, is one of a series of photographic stills taken from the video works of Julien's Baltimore Series. This body of work interrogates representations of Blackness within cultural and institutional settings memory sites, particularly the museum. Angela in Orange This image features Vanessa Myrie posing as Angela Davis in Baltimore’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Davis, a renowned abolitionist, scholar, and Black feminist philosopher is one of the most recognized political activists of the 60's and 70's. She is an ongoing advocate for prisoners' rights and a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex. Julien's powerful portrait of Davis pays homage to her unwavering commitment to justice.

Julien's varied work reimagines historical narratives through film. Using multi-screen film installations and photographic stills taken from these films, his art creates a new visual language that asks the viewer to reimagine with him. His pieces incorporate symbols and historical touchpoints to ground the viewer in a particular time and place while making iconographic interventions that challenge dominant historical narratives of Black America.

John Minihan is an Irish photographer who was raised in Athy, County Kildare. Moving to London at the age of twelve, he soon after became an apprentice photographer with the Daily Mail. At twenty one he achieved a position of the youngest staff photographer at the Evening Standard. He remained in London for another thirty years as a freelance photographer, and is known for his close relationship with various writers, most famously, Samuel Beckett, along with his intimate images of these literary figures. Throughout his life however, he has returned to his hometown of Athy every year to record the people and their daily lives. Minihan is now based in West-Cork.

Seamus Heaney, 2005, Silver gelatin print 27 x 24"
This photograph by Minihan is of Seamus Heaney, the Irish playwright, teacher, critic and Nobel Prize-winning poet. The image is taken at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, Co. Cork, where the literary community gather together each year to share and explore the craft of writing.

Samuel Beckett photographed in room 604, 1980, Silver gelatin print 27 x 24"
This photograph features Samuel Barclay Beckett, the esteemed Irish novelist, poet and playwright. The author of this powerful image, John Minihan, has frequently been hailed as Samuel Beckett's ‘official' photographer and rightfully so. His collection of captivating photographs of Beckett was made possible by his unparalleled access to the playwright, who typically shunned publicity. They first met in 1980 when Beckett was directing the one-act play, Endgame at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. The following day Minihan ventured to the Hyde Park Hotel to find Beckett in the now infamous room 604, where he captured a series of images, noting, "finally getting to meet Sam Beckett in that hotel room was the culmination of a ten year journey for me.” Minihan’s photographs of Beckett are arguably the most iconic pictures ever taken of the celebrated playwright.7

Liam Gillick works across diverse forms, including sculpture and installation. A theorist, curator and educator as well as an artist, Gillick’s line of enquiry is into conditions of production, including how it continues to operate in a post-industrial landscape: questions of economy, labour and social organisation are ongoing preoccupations. He is perhaps best known for producing sculptural objects: platforms, screens, models, benches, prototypes, signage, or structural supports made from sleek modular Plexiglas and aluminium forms in standardised colours from the RAL system. These seductive materials speak the language of industry and development: originally refined by the military. They have since been widely used in corporate interiors since the 1990s, a decade in which post-industrial societies saw a large-scale shift from the collective to the individualist and privatised. Drawing upon engineering and industrial design as well as the legacy of hard-edged minimalism, these abstract quasi-architectural forms offer a critique of neo-liberal or corporate aesthetics, automation and endless (re)development. Gillick’s Refusal Channelled uses these signature materials and demonstrates the artist’s interest in secondary forms – elements that support or disguise architectural structures. Freed of its architectural function, the channel work becomes an abstract, modular sculpture.

Liliane Lijn is a leading pioneer and exponent of kinetic art and continues to experiment with light, movement, words, film, liquids and industrial materials. Lijn describes herself as a “New Yorker by birth, a European by education, and a Londoner by choice”. Studying in Paris, she surrounded herself with Surrealists and members of the Beat poetry movement. Her intellectual leanings and friendships led her to experiment with the written word and to collaborate with poets. Upon traveling back to New York, she became fascinated with space exploration and new technologies –– completing an artist residency in a plastics factory where she was able to experiment with industrial plastics, fire and acids. Lijn's practice continues to be wide-ranging, and over the past two decades she has often worked in an architectural context, designing and constructing large-scale public sculptures.

Floating/Hanging Gardens of Rock City, showcases Lijn’s architectural leanings and visionary imaginings. In this collage, she visualizes her dream of connecting New Yorks’ Skyline with giant living walkways. Her utopian vision placed jungles and beaches on the roofs of Manhattan, creating a space for people to escape the bustling city and sink into their own imagination and panoramic curiosity

Liliane Tomasko is a Swiss-born abstract painter who lives and works in New York, Bavaria and London. Her works employ a distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour. The artist begins her investigation of the human psyche in the domestic sphere, offering attentive studies of bedding and clothing, the intimate textures of our lives. Through the artist's reflections, these prosaic materials open a gateway into the nocturnal realm of sleep and dreaming, articulating the creatively fertile space between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Tomasko’s approach to abstraction is rooted, therefore, in the physical realm but ultimately transcends beyond it. Fusing material observation with intuition and association, the artist produces vigorous, imaginative expressions of familiar environments and psychological states. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadow, and painterly gesture allow space to come in and out of focus, oscillating between clarity and obscurity and emulating the atmospheric power of dreams and memories.

Liliane Tomasko © Maelstrom, 2012, Oil on linen 42 x 48 inches
Like all of Liliane Tomasko’s paintings made up to 2014, Maelstrom is based on a Polaroid and forms part of another series of works called Stacks. In referencing the works, Tomasko explains how “piled up household fabrics are shot in an intimate, domestic setting using only daylight. The results are images that distort the actual colors and soften objects’ outlines to the point of complete transformation. Again, we are drawn into an unknown region of reality, a netherworld where things seem familiar yet nameless.’

Liliane Tomasko © The Fastening, 2007, Oil on aluminium 35 x 40 inches
The Fastening belongs to a body of paintings by Liliane Tomasko entitled Lex that show the corners of windows covered by blinds. These paintings are small to mid-sized works completed in a monochrome palette. Tomasko has commented that “the series are all characterized by being claustrophobic yet compelling as they can be read as meditations on light and dark. These works do not give a view onto anything, but keep the viewer looking inwards at a liminal interior space. Intended to throw the gaze back at the individual and thus pushing it inwards, these paintings probe into questions surrounding notions of the self and the possible boundaries that separate the individual from its environment. In short - who is looking?”

Liz Hernández is a Mexican artist currently based in Oakland, California. Her work spans a variety of techniques — painting, sculpture, embroidery, and writing — which she uses to blur the space between the real and the imaginary. Drawing inspiration from literature, anthropology, syncretism, oral traditions and the landscape of her birthplace, Mexico City, she searches for signs that disrupt the normalcy of everyday life. Her partially autobiographical work has led to collaboration with her family in the shape of very personal research.

Hernández is deeply influenced by the craft traditions of Mexico, and her practice investigates the language of materials and the different stories they tell. In the above works, Hernández explores the material of aluminum. She regards this material as timeless and otherworldly. These works utilize an aluminum embossing technique, known as "repujado," that she learned in Catholic school in Mexico. Hernández found inspiration in its widespread use for religious imagery. However, she uniquely employs it to convey mysticism and devotion to the inner world. This is evident in the gaze emanating from the long braids of a woman and in the flowers blooming from a hand, symbolizing the profound connection between humans, nature, and spirituality.

Hernández lived a significant part of her life in Ciudad Satélite, a 1960s modernist utopian project initiated by prominent architect Mario Pani. He proposed abandoning and relocating chaotic Mexico City to establish a fresh start. Constructed on the city's outskirts amid rural landscapes, the project featured totemic sculptures by renowned artists like Luis Barragán, Jesús Reyes Ferreira, and Mathias Goeritz, symbolizing progress. However, the utopian vision failed as the area became overpopulated and integrated into Mexico City's sprawling megalopolis. This clash of worlds is depicted in the juxtaposition of contemporary sculptures amidst rural fields once traversed by horses, now overtaken by cars and a different pace of life.

© The Estate of Louis le Brocquy

Mark Francis makes optically intense paintings driven by the revelatory insights of contemporary science, from the vast cosmic terrains of astronomy to the minute and molecular concerns of mycology, seeking to expand the realm of what and how we can see. Born in Northern Ireland but based in London since the 1980s, Francis first gained recognition in the dynamic British art scene of the 1990s. His paintings were included in Sensation, a large touring exhibition of artworks owned by Charles Saatchi gained media notoriety and launched the careers of many ‘YBA’ artists.

Making striking imagery out of what is normally invisible, Francis explores the visual worlds made accessible by new technologies such as electron microscopes. His paintings incorporate motifs drawn from the realm of molecular structures and cellular association – the building blocks from which all life is assembled – appearing in his work as scattered and interconnecting orbs. More recently, he has also drawn upon graphic interpretations of sonic data gathered from outer space, information received by radio telescopes as part of astronomers’ efforts to chart distant zones of the cosmos. The artist transforms such imagery through his distinct painterly language, which is also informed by the legacy of artistic modernism, in particular its use of the grid. Filled with a sense of movement and energy, his 2013 painting Spectrum is a classic example of the artist’s work, with vertical stripes and jostling orbs of saturated colour creating a dynamic interplay between colour and form. The painting conveys the artist’s fascination with interconnected systems and networks and celebrates the delicate balance of order and chaos.

Martin Puryear is an American abstract sculptor and printmaker whose work blends traditional techniques such as wood carving and joinery with modern methods. The resulting abstract forms are rich with psychological and cultural undertones, and subtly trace his own roots, alluding to histories of the African diaspora. Puryear has always gravitated towards the practices and creativity of Indigenous peoples that live closely by the source of materials they use in daily life. In honoring and exploring these global histories of craftsmanship, Puryear approaches his sculptures from a utilitarian lens and works largely by hand. His art plays with the boundaries between aesthetic and function, pushing the viewer to challenge inherited delineations that separate craft objects from artwork.

While he is best known for his sculptural works, Puryear incorporated printmaking into his artistic practice later on in his life. Using the flexibility of the printmaking process to workshop his sculptural ideas, his prints often explore similar forms and themes as his sculptural works. As featured in an episode of the television series Art in the 21st Century, Puryear reflected on the influences and motive behind his artistic style, noting that in his work, “people often see something organic and derived from nature and I'm certainly interested in nature. I'm really fascinated by natural forms and natural processes. But I'm probably more interested in the way that cultural forms evolve, the making process itself, and the history of the making process for me has always been a big generator of ideas.”

Mary McCartney is a portrait and fine art photographer, filmmaker, cookbook author, and climate activist of British and Irish descent. Since the beginning of her photographic practice in the 1990s, McCartney has focused on capturing rare moments of unguarded, emotionally charged intimacy. Her photographs are powerful personal records of the people and places close to her. Arresting in their spontaneity, they tell stories about her immediate environment and own life, revealing a deeply emotive visual diary of friendship, love and self-discovery. McCartney’s paternal family has roots in Ireland. Having spent time there in her formative years, her work is influenced by the people, their artistry and the rugged beauty of the Irish landscape.

Rose
This photograph captures a familiar dusty pink rose, a flower known so well. Yet it takes on a whole new perspective when seen from a different angle. Laying on the ground looking up towards the sky, a flash of light isolates this flower and brings it into dramatic focus, in doing so we start to notice its vulnerability and fragility.

Mother‘s side of the bed
Reflecting on love and loss, this image is a portrait of McCartney’s mum. The work shows that she need not physically be there, as the feeling of her presence can still be seen, in the creases of the sheets and the sunlight streaming in, illuminating where she just lay. In the foreground the linen folds and shapes to form peek’s that bring to mind a mountainous natural landscape. A moment captured, to always remember.

An internationally respected artist and critic, Merlin James approaches painting with an unconventional viewpoint, often seeking to deepen the language of the medium. He brings a poetic sensibility and formally adventurous technique to a range of subject matters, including post-industrial landscapes and riverside views, strange buildings, mysterious figures and abstract forms. Born in Wales, James has been based in Glasgow since 2004, where his home and studio looks out onto the River Clyde. Also an erudite and thoughtful critic, James has a deep engagement with the history of art – often giving lectures on painting, or curating exhibitions of overlooked early 20th-century artists – and this knowledge shapes and informs his practice.

Particular motifs or approaches to painting weave their way throughout James’s oeuvre, sometimes recurring across decades: railway signal boxes, windows, solitary figures, seascapes, dredging boats, and abstract lozenge shapes are just a few of his repeat subjects. Another celebrated and distinctive strand of the artist’s practice is his ‘frame paintings’, painted on gauzy, sheer material and allowing the painting’s wooden frame and stretcher bar – usually concealed behind the canvas – to become an integral part of the work. The Building on the Hill (2015) is from this ongoing body of work, fusing it with another of the artist’s much-loved genres, the vernacular landscape. The visible stretcher bar takes on a compositional role here, becoming the outline of a hill upon which stands a small structure, perhaps a church or civic hall, attended by several distant figures. Spare in detail but suggestive in mood, such scenes offer a glimpse into a prosaic or pastoral life, perhaps retrieved from a distant memory or observed from afar. As well as using unconventional choices of fabric for his canvas, James frequently manipulates the surface he paints on, piercing, cropping or distressing the picture plane, or pasting offcuts of hair and sawdust from around the studio into his works. Cut-offs from wooden frames can also become small sculptural works – suggesting a malleability of material and a sense of oneness and continuity that ebbs and flows through the artist’s practice.

Michael Craig-Martin’s paintings, inspired by the movements of Minimalism and Pop art, translate the world’s physicality into flat representations –– yet create an emotionally charged visual language of his own. While his depictions remain faithful to the objects shapes and lines, the artists manipulation of colour and scale in his paintings introduce an unconventional perspective to the familiar. Such playful subversions of reality, encourage the viewer to re-evaluate the mundane and the accepted narratives associated with the commonplace objects that we most regularly encounter.

During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, Craig-Martin began to explore new subject matter: flowers, fruits and vegetables, that, in the doorstep delivery era of the pandemic, began to take on a mass-produced quality similar to that of an iPhone. The rose, in particular, is a poignant image being the national flower of both the United Kingdom and the United States, the two countries in which the artist has spent most of his life. Depicted here in lush green against a background of vibrant red (the flower’s stereotypical shade), the painting subverts and exposes the viewer’s expectations of object and environment, representation and reality. 

Craig-Martin is best known for his work, An Oak Tree (1973), which helped shape the landscape of British Conceptualism. The work comprises a glass of water on a shelf and an accompanying text in which the artist explains that outward appearances notwithstanding, he has changed the humble object into the titular plant. The fascination with semantics revealed by the proclamation of a transformative manoeuvre has remained a key aspect of Craig-Martin’s practice.

Morag Ballard is a British artist who has evolved her own individual interpretation of the constructivist language of Modernist abstraction. Her paintings, such as Porthmeor Blue, explore shape, form and colour relationships with abstraction as her method of understanding and depicting space.

As seen in this work, Ballard's paintings are primarily explorations of formal geometric abstraction, although she often incorporates forms derived from the observable reality of landscape and architecture. In this case it is the light and the sea of Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives, Cornwall. Her works emerge from her experience of specific places, both man-made or natural, that offer what she describes as 'a structural drama with which I can explore', including the play between two and three dimensions evidenced in both her paintings and painted wood reliefs.

Born in Bordeaux, Nathalie Du Pasquier first discovered pattern and texture in West Africa in the 1970s, and has lived in Milan since 1979. A founding member of the Memphis design group, she designed textiles, carpets, plastic laminates, furniture and objects before dedicating herself to painting in 1987. Looking towards the language of Classicism as well as Italian metaphysical painting, Du Pasquier energises the tradition of still life with a sharp eye for colour, form, space and tone. Intrigued by the relationship between objects and the spaces in which they are installed, Nathalie Du Pasquier’s work has manifested in paintings, sculptures, designs, patterns, constructions, carpets, books, and ceramics—constantly acting between the representational and non-representational, the tangible and intangible, reality and imagination, and two- and three-dimensional forms. Her works often expand into clustered arrangements or onto the surrounding walls, taking a fluid and porous approach to traditional distinctions between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts. This is evident in Shelf, a modular painting in three parts, in which framed works on paper stack on top of one another. Du Pasquier often combines paintings from her archive with current works, reworking and reconfiguring them into new constellations. Here, a window-like form cojoins with a still life of a wooden box (built by the artist as a model for painting) and a crystal-like geometric cut-out – all formal devices that allow her to explore colour, shape, and the psychic life of objects.

Park Seo-Bo was one of the first South Korean artists to turn to abstraction in the Korea of the 1950s. For over 60 years he has been committed to pushing boundaries and embracing new vocabularies of expression. Characterized by simplicity and dynamism, his works aim to lead to an action that empties and cultivates one’s mind through deep meditation.

His best known series, Écriture, reflects a unique sensitivity and engagement with tradition through his use of Korean mulberry paper, hanji. At the same time, Écriture subverts the conventional order inherent to the painting medium through the dynamic but subtle three-dimensional surface of his works. Through his detailed process laid the groundwork for the Dansaekhwa Movement. Dansaekhwa or monochrome painting refers to 20th century abstract paintings reduced to a single, pure paint hue that reject not only theme and content, but also image, line, and form. These works maximized the materiality of paper by highlighting the countlessly repeated actions used such as rubbing, scraping, and pushing upon the still-wet surface. In this sense, Park Seo-Bo’s works allow rudimentary gestures and materials used to create the painting to become the art itself.

Throughout the series, Korean tradition and modernity are fused simultaneously. Écriture depicts a profoundly simple world where repetitive acts are the norm, yet it is imbued with the worldview of Eastern Zen philosophy, resonating with the concept of non-self and the process of self-reflection. To put it bluntly, it is the manifestation of his theory that "painting is an act of emptying the mind and merely a tool for self cultivation," practiced on canvas.

Écriture No 981125, made in Park Seo-Bo’s mid-Écriture period of the 1990s, sees a shift in the artist’s methods, where he sought to remove the traces of his hand. He refrained from using his fingers to scratch and rub on the hanji directly, instead, using instruments such as sticks and rulers to create regular intervals of furrows, thus making long, protruding lines across the surfaces.

The Black color of this work is special to Seo-Bo, having personal and historical significance beyond just the concept of color. He calls his black ‘Korean Black.’ Korean black is not perfectly pure like Vantablack, nor does it attempt to be. Instead, it is closer to different layers of gray, which is a trail of stacked time.

Park Seo-Bo refers to Korean Black as the color of Agungi. An agungi is a firebox found in traditional Korean kitchens, which is used for cooking and floor heating. The artist recalls: "My mother would crouch by the stove every day throwing kindling into the agungi, and then make rice and stew in the cauldron. I would crouch next to her, watching her work. Around the agungi, there would always be sparks and ash flying around, and the walls, ceilings, and eaves would all be stained from the smoke. This went on not just for a few days, but for decades as the years settled. One day I sensed something and stuck out my hand to feel the soot. It was like being sucked into obscurity. It wasn't just black; it was thick layers of darkness... That day I sensed what it meant for there to be a black as deep and vast as the universe."

Park Seo-Bo’s drawings are akin to idea sketches for substantial works, but these pieces cannot be simply seen as mere outline or blueprint. Created using charcoal and pencil, drawings are meticulously and neatly drawn as if measured with a ruler, demonstrating a certain degree of spacing required in all directions, making them inherently beautiful on their own.

Paule Vézelay was a British artist who became an active member of the Parisian avant-garde, and an innovative abstract artist. She was a member of the Abstraction-Création movement –– a counterpoint group to the Surrealists. In The Dictionary of Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor wrote that “Few artists illustrate as well as Paule Vézelay the many-sidedness of art. She has practiced painting, sculpture, collages, compositions with stretched strings, drawings, engraving. Her work has a discreet charm and elegant purity.”

After moving to France and adopting the name Paule Vézelay (being born as Marjorie Watson-Williams) she lived for several years with the Surrealist André Masson and mixed with many of the most significant artists of the Parisian Avant-garde including Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp.

Vézelay’s early work was figurative, and apart from her Surrealist-inspired works of the 1930s and her wartime drawings, she was one of the first British artists to commit totally to the abstract movement. In 1939 Vézelay returned to England, but continued to exhibit regularly in France. In England, she mainly retreated from public view until the Tate Gallery retrospective exhibition of her work in 1983. Her work is represented in museum and institutional collections in Britain and internationally.

The stylized still life painting, Composition with Blue Vase and Table, emerges from Paule Vézelay’s engagement with elements of the later phase of Cubism. She had become part of the School of Paris, absorbing the avant-garde influences around her in Paris.

In this assured composition, Vézelay simplifies the basic forms of blue vase and table and observes them from a point of view tipped flat-on towards us in an almost theatrical presentation. This semi-abstract painting indicates some influence of French Cubist artists, such as Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinge, and incorporates typical Vézelay flourishes of playful line. The painting was made at an important moment in her life and career in 1928 –– just before Vézelay moved closer to Surrealism after meeting André Masson, and before she gradually committed herself to Abstraction.

Study for Painting (Triangle and Tubes) dates from 1932 when Paule Vézelay lived with the French Surrealist artist André Masson. The work was made during the final year that they were together. The drawing was a study for a painting bearing the same title. The two works are similar except for a difference in their palette, though the drawing belies a more sombre tone. Vézelay’s version of Surrealism also had a more playful, rhythmic element than that of Masson, not discounting the inherent tension of her interlocked forms. This work also demonstrates more of the elements of abstraction that she was
increasingly moving towards.

Samuel Laurence Cunnane is an artist from Kilgarvan, Co Kerry who works in analogue photography. He frequently drives across Ireland, continental Europe and further afield, capturing moments of idiosyncratic beauty as he passes from place to place. He then returns to his native Kerry to develop and print his photographs by hand in a darkroom. In approaching his subject matter, Cunnane is always drawn to the outskirts – bypassing the centre for the overlooked periphery, capturing the point at which plants battle with concrete, or the frontier between interior and exterior, demarcated by fences, windows, topiary. His photographs deromanticise the popularly sentimental, with landscapes interrupted by utilitarian infrastructure, and yet their sensitivity to light, framing and texture give them a cinematic quality.

Tree and Clouds 2 (2016) and Mist (2019) are both photographs taken near the artist’s home in Co Kerry. Luminous leaves look almost hyperreal as they catch the light of a setting sun in the first photograph. The off-centre framing typifies Cunnane’s interest in the edges and peripheries and transforms the tree branches into abstract stripes across the sky. Meanwhile in Mist, the parched and rocky grassland of a Co Kerry hilltop meets its opposite: a white cloud of mist rising from the sea. Vivid in colour and texture, the photograph captures the drama and infamous changeability of Ireland’s coastal weather, quickly passing from sun to mist and rain, and the sense of openness in the landscape.

Though places and geographic terrains, whether natural or built environments, make up most of Cunnane’s oeuvre, the artist also makes sensitive and intimate portraits of his friends and acquaintances, often in moments of quiet repose and reflection. In Celia looks out the window (2016), his friend appears wrapped in both the gauzy fabric of a curtain and the golden glow of light that illuminates it. Unable to see outside, we’re invited to ruminate instead on the act of looking. Veils are a frequent motif in Cunnane’s work, often shielding the viewer from the outside world. In such portraits, Cunnane probes at the transformative capability of the camera as a tool to elevate the personal ordinary story to a different place; ‘a cinematics of the everyday’. Using a universal cinematic language to approach personal stories, otherwise mundane scenes are bestowed a hidden world of potential narratives.

Dublin-born abstract painter Sean Scully is known for his paintings that balance dynamic bands of colour in rhythmic formulations, capturing tonality, light and mood with great drama and emotion. His art is highly physical, often monumental in scale and populated by vigorous, robust shape and form, yet is also honest, intimate and even vulnerable. An abstractionist but not a formalist, Scully deploys the power of colour, depth and volume not only to give expression to the world around him, but to provide access to the spiritual domain. In recent years, the artist’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – monumental and megalithic-feeling stone blocks that weigh down on the land, as well as airy structures in Corten steel that open up and interact with the landscape. Across these diverse approaches to making art, Scully utilises a consciously constrained system to open up an energetic multiplicity of aesthetic possibility and emotional range.

The Sean Scully Room at the hotel brings together work from a range of periods and interests, from the 1970s to the present day. The collection begins with Minimalism seen in the graphic qualities of UNTITLED #5 (1979) described in the painter’s words as: “Extreme discipline and severity, making a zen like field, softened by nocturnal light. Black upon nearly black.” As a succession to this kind of rigour, comes an entertainment of disorder in Study for Clash (1982). Commenting on the piece, Scully reflects that it is “one of my most important works on paper, since it is a study for a painting that was never made. It is from a crucial year, 1982, when after the demise of minimalism, I put panels painted very differently, up against each other, to make relationships that clashed.”

In Moorland (2007), robust blocks of colour in tones of stone grey and slate are stacked into a resonant formation, negotiating a balance between movement and harmony. Scully sees the relationships between these forms as carrying a metaphor for how we organise our world, commenting that “edges are always negotiated”. Moorland is part of Scully’s Wall of Light series – a body of world that earned him a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Meanwhile, Landline Edge captures the powerful experience of standing at the edge of land and looking out towards the ocean. Horizontal bands of colour reference the meeting of land, sea and sky, in his words, bringing “abstract painting back towards nature.”

The collection includes two of Scully’s ‘iPhone drawings’, from a series of prints Scully made using his figure on an iPhone screen. A celebration of tactility in an age of immateriality, the works use the immediacy of drawing on a device, before transforming the resulting image into an archival pigment print. The motifs of Scully’s paintings take on a more wiry, electric appearance here – bands of horizontal colour appear inset to a

grid in Cage Green, while Ire combines a drawing, also showing an inset within a caged form, beside a short poem. Using the sonic elements of language as building blocks to be repeated and reconfigured, the poem has a swing and sense of rhythm that chimes with the playful, expressive spirit of this series of drawings. Printmaking has long been an essential element of Scully’s practice, and these works carve out a space for drawing and mark-making in the age of the smartphone and reconsider the legacy of minimalism and abstraction in the 21st Century.

Landline Edge captures the powerful experience of standing at the edge of land and looking out towards the ocean. Horizontal bands of colour reference the meeting of land, sea and sky, bringing abstract painting back towards the elemental forces of nature.

Also from Scully’s series of ‘iPhone drawings’, Ire combines a drawing – also showing an inset within a caged form – with a short poem. Using the sonic elements of language as building blocks to be repeated and reconfigured, the poem has a swing and sense of
rhythm that chimes with the playful, expressive spirit of this series of drawings.

Theaster Gates is a Chicago based artist whose practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, urban intervention and land development. Trained as both a sculptor and an urban planner his practice at a formal level contends with the notion of Black space, engaging with themes of collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of pragmatism. Through his work as an artist, archivist, and curator, he seeks to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change.

Withered Historical Record With Content is a monumental work from Gates’ celebrated Civil Tapestry series. Lengths of decommissioned fire hose have been carefully arranged, stitched and bound to create a large-scale ‘painting’ comprising bands of softly undulating red that shift rhythmically –– and resemble canonical American Expressionist paintings of the 1960s. Yet the works’ raw material (fire hoses) are charged with political symbolism: literally embodying the struggles of the civil rights movement, chiefly, the use of high-pressure water hoses against peaceful demonstrators of school-age in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

The work demonstrates Gates’s engagement with the possibilities of salvaged objects. In his Civil Tapestries and in his practice more broadly, he seeks out materials that hold historic and iconic significance with a view to repurposing them within the context of modernist art historical tropes and through his own artistic lens.

Two Black Lines forms part of Gates’ acclaimed series of Tar Paintings, an ongoing body of work that began in 2011. In referencing the compositions of Modernist abstract painters and sculptors, Gates’ roofing works extend the canon of art history, employing the innate formalism of tar – and roofing – as a material practice to forge new possibilities in painting. As an everyday material used in construction – and so associated with ideas of shelter, security and stability – Gates elevates the material's value whilst allowing for creative experimentation and fluidity. A democratisation of the formalistic tropes of Minimalism.

Blue Bottle and Pan is a key example of William Scott’s lifetime fascination with still life painting. The work comes out of a moment in the late 1960s and 70s where Scott was becoming incredibly minimalistic and where he gave precedence to colour and form above all else. Scott was part of a new generation of Postwar painters, who were embracing European Modernism as well as the work of the American Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. These artists prioritised colour and emotion over representation and through this gave abstract form to everyday lived experiences. In Blue Bottle and Pan, Scott takes three-dimensional objects and presents them in a simple and linear two-dimensional manner, expressing what Scott declared at the beginning of his career in 1947, and which lies at the heart of his work: ‘I find beauty in plainness, in a conception which is precise… a simple idea which to the observer in its intensity must inevitably shock and leave a concrete image in the mind.’

While Scott was born in Scotland, he was deeply connected to Ireland: moving at a young age with his family to his father's hometown of Enniskillen. Here, Scott began art classes with a local teacher and later enrolled at the Belfast School of Art before completing his studies at various Royal Academy Schools in London. Art education remained a longstanding interest, reflected by a move to France to establish an art school. However, his Irish roots continued to call to him and his career is marked by trips and longer stays around Ireland including a visit to Glengarriff later in his life.

Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art film and photography for four decades. Exploring the relationship between landscape and memory, the artist uses a camera to document how landscapes and territories are affected by political change, in particular his native city of Derry in Northern Ireland. Having witnessed Bloody Sunday as a child, Doherty began working as an artist in the 1980s, at a time when Northern Ireland’s conflict, known as The Troubles, was still ongoing. He first came to international recognition for powerful works pairing text and photographic image, often honing in on the border between the North and Republic of Ireland and other fraught political zones. Studying these terrains in forensic detail, Doherty’s video and photo works reveal the impossibility of objectivity and historical truth, often using diptychs to set contradictory points of view against each other. Doherty has trained his lens on sites of contested history elsewhere in the world, including Granada, Pennsylvania and the US/Mexico border.

Doherty’s Show of Strength series was made a decade after the signing of the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. This photograph captures the raising of a makeshift Irish flag above one of the region’s newly decommissioned military bases – capturing a historic moment and acting as a testament to the times Ireland has come through. Meanwhile, with its restrained but rigorous composition, Dead End explores how landscape acts as a repository of memory, documenting how past events leave traces on the environment, and time’s steady erasure of such traces. A fork in the road is shrouded in fog, obscuring small details and residues, creating an unsettled and uneasy sense of place.

With its restrained but rigorous composition, Dead End explores how landscape acts as
a repository of memory, documenting how past events leave traces on the environment,
and time’s steady erasure of such traces. A fork in the road is shrouded in fog,
obscuring small details and residues, creating an unsettled and uneasy sense of place.