VISUAL ART:GUGGI'S PAINTINGS AT the Kerlin Gallery are on the one hand raw and physical and assertive and, on the other, full of hesitancies and uncertainties. They're painted on a rough grade of plywood, panels that have been crudely cut down from eight-by-four foot sheets, as though by someone who can't saw in a straight line.

In the rarefied space of the gallery, the pristine white cube, this is provocatively brash and offhand. At the same time, there’s a humility to the material and the process that is echoed in the way the paint is applied.

Guggi, an erstwhile member of the cult band the Virgin Prunes, is a self-taught painter who, after he began to exhibit his work at the end of the 1980s, gradually earned respect in the art world. What was impressive was his willingness to learn and his commitment to painting as a long-term project. Perhaps surprisingly, he was drawn to the most staid imagery imaginable: pots and pans formally marshalled in still life arrangements that recalled the spare rigour of William Scott. The pots, jugs and vessels are still there in his new work, still lined up in some compositions.

While his paintings are still quite spare in form, new elements have found their way into his vocabulary. A while back he began to incorporate fragments of telephone numbers, apparently inspired by the way we’re forever jotting down phone numbers. These fragmentary numbers had a strange resonance, evoking connections beyond the internal circuitry of the paintings. He’s extended that idea of reaching outside the painting with other numbers and text, often in Cyrillic lettering. The references include stencils on transport crates and various numerical codes including museological labelling.

Often the vessels are depicted incompletely, in faltering outline, adding to the ideas of tenuous connections and memories, of home and distance that characterise this body of work. Guggi has, it’s worth noting, become a skilled, subtle colourist.

MERCEDES HELNWEIN'S second show at the Molesworth, Whistling Past the Graveyard, follows on seamlessly from the work in her first. Her vividly evoked imaginative world is distinctly cinematic: dramatically charged and lit, infused with tension and mystery. And, in fact, several works are titled Film Still and have the appearance of single frames excerpted from a sequence. Workaday objects, such as toy plastic models of animals, are used in a slightly sinister way.

There is a sense of protagonists engrossed in their own disturbed, hallucinatory worlds. The protagonists are usually young women, and they are alternatively strong, self-contained, in control, and possible victims. While there is a theatrical air to it all, a sense of make-believe, Helnwein maintains a genuine edginess as well, so that we can’t be quite sure that everything will be okay. It is stylish noir, delivered with considerable bravura.

WORKS BY A number of major artists have been assembled for Hillsboro Fine Art's appositely-titled International: 20th Century and Contemporary Masters. They include the American colour field painter Larry Poons, whose densely textured, vibrant paintings are not only three-dimensional but seem virtually animate. The Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is best known for his elaborate, ritualised performance pieces, often visceral in nature, but his paintings are usually very impressive when you encounter them, and such is the case with the example here.

You’ll also find really fine pieces by Robert Motherwell, Jean-Paul Piopelle, Terry Frost, John Hoyland, Joan Mitchell, Markus Lupertz, Gerhard Richter and Martin Kippenberger, and more besides. It is a remarkable line-up and anyone with an interest in 20th century and contemporary art should really take the time to have a look at it.

THE 131ST ANNUAL Exhibition of the Dublin Painting and Sketching Club has been drawing large numbers of visitors to the concourse of Dún Laoghaire County Hall. The club has an illustrious history. Its current membership numbers 82 artists, from a variety of backgrounds, and they are showing some 268 pieces in all. Traditional subjects and techniques are the rule – mostly landscape or interiors, still life, botanical studies and some figure studies. There are artists who venture into abstraction as well though: Nuala Clarke is a good example, and her work is very impressive.

It’s no harm to mention that a lot of what’s on view represents amazingly good value. Tom Wilson is a fine watercolourist, for example, and his impeccably made studies of the Donegal coast, plus one of Killiney, are so modestly priced that you may have to double check. Pauline Scott is also a strong watercolourist, whose substantial compositions are meticulously organised (something of the same could be said for Philip Shipman). Michael McWilliams’s landscapes are more formalised, rather in the manner of Barbara Warren and, as with her work, they are nicely restrained and atmospheric.

Richard McEvoy has a harder descriptive style – very effectively so – and is able to handle a large composition in his view of the Bailey as adeptly as a terrific, tiny study of San Terenzo.

In her coastline studies, Bridget Flinn displays a great grasp of structure and pattern as translated from the landscape into the painting. Marie Fallon’s exact landscapes include an outstanding, panoramic view of Bull Island.

Also notable are Maura Earley's oils, Fergal Flanagan's laudably ambitious account of a Misty Day, Lough Allen, and Doreen Dunne's bold grasp of atmospheric sunlight. Yanny Petters's work stands out among the several botanical studies, as does Pamela Leonard's, though she ranges further as well. Her Old Gateis a beautiful, free-flowing landscape study.

Landscape emerges well from an overview of the exhibition, which is probably not surprising given that landscape has long been the dominant genre in Irish painting. That’s not all that’s worth seeing, though, and there are fine pieces – such as those by Don Griffin and Margaret Hallidan – that don’t fit easily into any generic category.

Sales have gone up year on year at previous annual shows, and perhaps the competitive pricing of much of what’s on offer is a conscious response to the current economic climate. Either way, it’s worth checking out.

Guggi. Paintings Based on the Forms and Patterns of Vessels and Typography. Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne St. Until Apr 25; Whistling Past the Graveyard.Mercedes Helnwein. Molesworth Gallery, 16 Molesworth St Until Apr 10; International: 20th Century and Contemporary Masters. Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Victor Pasmore, John Hoyland, Hermann Nitsch and many more. Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Sq West. Until May 8; Dublin Painting Sketching Club 131st Annual Exhibition. Concourse Arts Centre, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Hall, Marine Rd, Dún Laoghaire. Until Apr 5.