What’s the Story?
This show at Cork’s Crawford gallery opens with El Prestigadore Despogjade, a Seán Keating painting from 1918. Inspired by Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, it offers a take on the oft-blurred divide between reality and fantasy and the dual role played by the hero/anti-hero figure in morality tales.
Conceived by curator Michael Waldron to pique interest in the gallery’s mostly static collection, this exhibition attempts to bring history paintings to life and encourage fresh readings of old familiars. It positions visual art as “a repository for cultural memory and storytelling”, while asking us to consider that there are always multiple versions of history.
There are several inspired groupings: a recent Pat Scott positioned next to a 1960s Michael Farrell, pictured; a trio of landscape abstractions by Patrick Collins, Tim Goulding and Anne Madden; The Breadline, Muriel Brandt’s essential 1916 painting, flanked by William Orpen’s The Revolutionary from 1902 and Segregation by Rita Duffy from 1989. The theme of history, memory and myth is stretched at times, but this is a reanimation worth revisiting.
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Thu until 8pm, 021 480 5042