For a critic who spends the whole year looking at art, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) annual show can feel like a summer display case of the inevitable and the predictable. There’s Janet Mullarney with two prints based on sculptures already seen in various exhibitions since 2015; there’s Colin Davidson with a trademark fleshy-faced portrait of John Hume; there’s Martin Gale with some nice new paintings and Alice Maher with a print featuring a silhouette she’s been using a lot lately. Hello, again, James Hanley and Una Sealy. And Charles Harper, Brian Bourke, Brian Ferran, Anita Shelbourne, James English, and other RHA members who show the same kind of work every year and keep coming back with more, some of it pleasing to revisit, some of it not.
This familiarity can be comforting, even oddly reassuring, when the exhibition is good overall. The RHA annual represents a sum total sample effort by a particular cohort of artists, some established or establishment (including RHA members, who are entitled to exhibit), some invited (en route, presumably, to establishment status), and some accepted through open submission, which this year attracted 2,476 entries from 1,400 artists, from which 321 artworks got in. In such circumstances, what anyone who sees a lot of art on a regular basis is looking for is quite simple: the odd work that stops you in your tracks, standout pieces, surprises.
This year that accolade goes to RHA member Maeve McCarthy, who shows just one painting. In the Garden is a masterful, tall, dark composition in which a mop-head hydrangea lurks in the gloom at night. It’s a brilliantly gothic garden scene in murky green, mouldy white, pale verdure and black. Bravo. McCarthy has found her painterly mojo again after several years of her annual show contributions being competent but ignorable.
Hydrangeas tend to produce a love/hate reaction in Irish people. This Japanese native shrub has long been a low-maintenance favourite for reliably blowsy blooming at Irish farmhouses and cottages. Overtly fancy but practically common, hydrangeas attract near contempt for their ordinary showiness and resilience. They have a novel, possibly once regarded as almost racy, ability to change colour in soils of different pH value, although white varieties do not. In the Garden is part of a body of work connected to McCarthy’s return visits to her grandmother’s home in rural Northern Ireland.
Who else stands out? Andrew Folan, whose Dante’s Cloak prints are dark and enticing, with pearls in burnt paper settings. Also notable are small sculptures: in glass by Kelly O’Connor, wood by Young Sun Lim, ceramic by Alison Kay, and stone by Martin Lyttle, Eileen McDonagh and Bojana Krizanec, who shows a soulful marble two-piece, The Separated. There are plenty of young and early- to mid-career painters worth keeping an eye on here, including Colin Martin. This show lays out its stall with a delightful line-up of small paintings — by Caroline Ward, Claire Halpin, Kate Dick, Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Kelvin Mann, Ann Quinn and more — running up the wall of the main stairwell like an offering of amuse-bouche.
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Portraits dominate in the Tony Ryan Gallery downstairs. Vera Klute disappoints, but works by Eddie Rafferty, Cassie Kirby, Patrick Redmond and Tom McClean impress. Four painted portraits in a row — With Flowered Wallpaper by Catherine Creaney, Tronie (Head of a Man) by Cian McLoughlin, Miseon Lee’s Exhale and Blaise Smith’s Self-Portrait — make for a stunning array.
There are near-hidden gems, by Dorothy Smith and others, amid the selection of mostly monochrome or greyscale works in the Ashford Gallery. Do not miss I Told My Mom I Was Going on a School Trip, Jennifer Trouton’s painting, which is almost lost under the stairs. It deserves more attention.
It’s difficult to impress with photography these days, but among those who do are Gene Lambert, whose striking animal photographs are in the foyer, Myles Shelly, Seán Breithaupt, Ieva Baltaduonyte, Ruth E Lyons, Hugh O’Conor, Andy Sheridan and the stalwart Amelia Stein. Abigail O’Brien’s startlingly lucid cutlery and pots photographs are quiet show stoppers in Gallery I.
Of course, most people do not go to as many exhibitions as a critic, and experience delightful variety, range, styles and volume at the RHA annual. This show does that too. Tracks over Barren Territory, four bare landscape works by Maria Simonds-Gooding, with rutted lines gouged in white plaster, hang to great effect next to three seascape paintings full of vigour by Donald Teskey. Landscape art offers a peculiar opportunity for escapism, to a world outside ourselves that somehow takes us closer to a world within. Pat Harris and Mark Garry stand out in this arena too. One of the joys of this show is the levelling democracy of hanging works by members and non-members side by side, the wonderful egalitarian nature of a blind selection from open submission.
“Even when you think you have seen it all, the RHA still has a few new tricks
In general, the RHA annual reads like a fair reduction of available works, given the criteria, personal preferences and tastes of the selection committee. RHA president Mick O’Dea’s portraits of fellow artists Geraldine O’Neill and Patrick Pye serve as a reminder that RHA members play a role in documenting themselves.The show pays tribute to lost fellows including painters John Long and John Coyle, writer Anthony Cronin and art historian Anne Crookshank. The late Basil Blackshaw’s dramatic charcoal drawing The Fall from 1975, with its apparently headless horse and rider crashing to the ground in a foetal roll and ball, are on display in Gallery I. O’Dea’s portrait of Stephen McKenna, his predecessor, hangs in the foyer.
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Imogen Stuart, 90, is the second surprise of this show, with her tender and phallic-looking hand-cut turf carvings, Turf Lovers and Bog Lovers. The RHA annual may be an occasion for some to rehash old ideas, but it also remakes itself yearly with mostly fresh work, proving that even when you think you have seen it all, the RHA still has a few new tricks.
The 187th RHA Annual exhibition runs until August 12 at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin