All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun
Coach House, Dublin Castle
★★★★☆
In At Swim-Two-Birds, his avant-garde masterpiece, Flann O’Brien unspools a mythic, absurdist narrative via an unnamed narrator, a literature student at University College Dublin.
The novel begins with the narrator’s reflection on his preference for multiplicity in literature: “One beginning and one ending for a book,” he says, “was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”
The artist curators Lee Welch and Paul Hallahan reference Flann O’Brien as a big influence on their selection criteria for All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun. O’Brien and his unreliable student narrator’s penchant for rhapsodic multiplicity, couched in the cool irony of a literary idler, strikes a chord with the presentation of artworks in this intriguing two-room exhibition.
Welch and Hallahan have assembled 19 artists, including well-known names such as William McKeown, Eva Rothschild, Elizabeth Peyton, Samir Mahmood and Genieve Figgis, in a show that spans painting, sculpture, photography and video.
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Rothschild’s polystyrene and resinous plaster construct Trophy, from 2014, is a notable contribution to the exhibition’s opening gambit: standing more than 3m tall, the sculpture is a dominant, sinuous presence. Rothschild has said that she asks objects to do what they weren’t designed for, and this sense of precarious play or forced pretence sits neatly within the curatorial framing.
Her work is positioned opposite Hallahan’s large-scale diptych Myths of Innocence, creating a strong dynamic at the heart of the exhibition’s first room. His compositions are pale, minimal abstracts, where evanescent structures vanish and disappear into the background. This style of impermanence, or evaporation, recurs throughout the gallery floors.
Before his untimely death, in 2011, McKeown, who was born in Co Tyrone, explored subtle shifts in chromatic gradations, leading to work such as the almost imperceptible watercolour Hope Drawing.
There are also Aleana Egan’s delicate wall-mounted sculptures In the Street and Slow Channels: made from card, tape and gauze, they hang lightly in the room, inviting the audience to stare through and around their skeletal forms, as though cultivating a sense of their own invisibility.
Welch’s portrait It’s an Interesting Question, depicting a thoughtful woman in a rocking chair, chooses the painting’s most vibrant colours for the sitter’s dress; her face, head and bare arms seem to be fading into inexistence, as though her corporeality has been leached away by the force of her introspection.
That said, this is not a single-minded exhibition. Impermanence is not the principle driving Mahmood’s magisterial Tongue of Invisible Mysteries II, for instance – quite the opposite. A 1.2m-wide journey in hallucinatory gouache painting, this new work is a milestone in the development of Mahmood’s artistic career.
His signature style of sensual eroticism and Islamic iconography is given unparalleled licence here, elegantly delivering a continuous series of tapestry-like panels that infuse religious and mythological figures with a measure of abstract, queasy intimacy.
All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun is at the Coach House, Dublin Castle, until Sunday, May 11th
