DENIS Mitchell's sculptures have not, to my knowledge, ever been seen in Ireland, unless a few knowledgeable collectors have had access to them. So this is a double "first" - for Mitchell himself (now dead, alas) and for a new Dublin gallery, The Bridge, which is hard by the Ormonde Hotel on the quays.
The "Friends" make an impressive grouping in themselves: Tony and Jane O'Malley, Conor Fallon, Nancy Wynne Jones, Breon O'Casey. All of these knew Mitchell well in Cornwall, and in fact the entire exhibition brings back nostalgically the ambience of St Ives and its School, whose traditions they inherit.
Mitchell actually lived and worked for years in nearby Newlyn, but his ties with St Ives were close and took an active (and honourable) role in its art life as an organiser and anchor man. He was, as is generally admitted, a sterling personality, but his status as a sculptor is still several degrees beneath what it should be.
Superficially there is a kinship with Barbara Hepworth, whose assistant he was for several years, but with familiarity this resemblance recedes and can be seen as largely the common inheritance of abstract art since the World War. Mitchell is generally less formalistic than Hepworth, more rugged and organic, and altogetherless cerebral and "cool". She may have been his superior in the big, public piece but since Mitchell received few commissions this is not proven.
That he was a major artist in his own right I have no doubt at all: this is international abstraction of the purest kind, in the line of Gabo and Brancusi though with a certain West Country accent added. Mitchell was equally surehanded in wood and stone (several of the pieces are in slate) as he was in bronze and though the works are not startlingly original, their strength and individuality emerges at the second or third inspection. He was a consummate technician, dedicated to perfect finish, who pursued his ideas stubbornly until they had reached their final and unalterable form.
The other exhibitors will be familiar to Irish viewers - Breon O'Casey perhaps less than most but as a painter his ripening as a colourist is notable. Conor Fallon's elaborate standing sculptures in steel, at once open ribbed and monumental, are immediately imposing; the one and only Tony O'Malley is well represented by some large recent pictures and Nancy Wynne Jones's subtle landscape style - at the moment she is working much in warm tones - is always individual. The elegant, linear works of Jane O'Malley complete an exhibition which is well out of the ordinary, and also well above it.
