Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling made her first image of Oscar Wilde, she says, when she was about 14

Maggi Hambling made her first image of Oscar Wilde, she says, when she was about 14. The pictures in her current exhibition show that the English artist's fascination with the Irish writer has endured, even if they do not make it clear why.

Hambling has been commissioned to create a London monument to Wilde. Her Dublin show, as well as featuring numerous renderings of Wilde in paint, print and pencil, also contains sculpture, mocked-up photographs and maquettes of the proposed monument.

Her chosen point of access to Wilde is through his head and skull. (Some non-Wildean images on show, inspired by Mexican art, also pay a great deal of attention to skulls, although with more ghoulish intent). It is as if Hambling has taken her lead from Beards ley's images of Salome. Indeed, one of the sculptures here, a long verdigrised bronze with Wilde's head held aloft on three vaporous rails, seems inflected with Beardsley's dripping head of John the Baptist.

Although Hambling has given shape to some of her ideas in flickering, frantically-striated oils, her pencil images make far better use of preliminarity as a tool. Several of her images of Wilde are marked as being drawn with eyes shut, but all of them figure Wilde as a dream image, a figure created almost entirely from smoke.

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This seems by far Hambling's best option, but the durability required of public work becomes an issue in the final ideas for her Wilde monument. Her planned piece, Conversation with Oscar Wilde, a black granite sarcophagus which doubles as a park bench, offers yet another head of Wilde - a stately, but overbearing, plinth.

Until December 14th.