This is not the entire AIB collection, which is very large, but a selection from it made by Ciaran MacGonigal. Even then, it runs to over 200 works - paintings, sculpture, graphics, in themselves often wildly disparate but adding up in toto to an impressive muster. Since there is still no comprehensive collection of contemporary or recent Irish art in any of our museums, the AIB collection should be taken into account in this capacity, even if it is rarely seen together. Conceptual and installation pieces are not included.
Since the entire exhibition space of the RHA Gallery Gallery - upstairs and downstairs - is completely taken over for the event, it is plain enough that any sort of review runs the danger of being a mere list of names and works. So, in short, you takes your pick. The old masters, Yeats, Orpen, Roderic O'Conor, Nathaniel Hone (a superb seascape with fishing boats, which has been seen before on various occasions), are all solidly represented, and then comes the nationalist generation of Keating and MacGonigal. Incidentally, Keating's painting On the Run, for which Sean O'Sullivan and Maurice MacGonigal are supposed to have posed as two of the republicans, is very much better than his later work.
Joseph Malachy Kavanagh's much-reproduced Cockle Pickers remains a magically evocative work, though it belongs more in the ambience of Dutch or Belgian art than of Ireland. Paul Henry's understated, morning-light painting of a lake in Donegal is one of his finest, while a real surprise is the excellent Claddagh Harbour by Lilian Davidson, a hard person to pin down. The two Leech pictures I found naggingly conventional.
After this again there is the generation associated with the Living Art, Collins, Le Brocquy, Nano Reid, Dillon etc, - though I note the absence of George Campbell. Patrick Hennessy, with three beautifully chosen pictures (he always needs careful choice), is a particularly strong presence - a special kind of cross between Surrealism and direct observation. The Colin Middleton choice also stresses his surreal side, which I am not sure is his best. There are three works by Tony O'Malley, including the familiar, and brilliantly luminous, Arawak Beach. And there is a superb William Scott, Blue Still Life with Knife, which comes late in his career and shows him inching into a kind of minimalism of his own creation.
A painting of barges in a canal by Camille Souter is a reminder of how good she is at her best; contemporaries of hers such as Barrie Cook, Patrick Pye, and Basil Blackshaw are adequately rather than strikingly represented. The late Charles Brady, too, is duly remembered. Then we plunge into younger artists such as Michael Mulcahy, Charles Tyrrell, Brian Maguire, John Shinnors, Hughie O'Donoghue, Felim Egan, and even younger ones again (the AIB keeps up to date). However, the exhibition is not hung in chronological order, for which I am grateful since the art-historical note can dull or deaden visual impact, turning a live exhibition into a historical survey.
The sculpure is relatively sparse, and there are no large pieces on view, which after all is to be expected. F.E. McWilliam, John Bourke, Michael Warren, Conor Fallon,Edward Delaney, Eilis O'Connell, Melanie le Brocquy, Carolyn Mulholland, John Kindness all combine to supply quality and talent in depth, but I would have liked a few big free-standing pieces. All that floor space . . . Of the graphic work, I thought the pick was by (the late) Mary Farl Powers, Brian Kennedy, Lucy Turner, and John Kelly.
Runs until February 8th.
