In this market, the RHA's Annual Exhibition needs to remain populist, to be inclusive and to attract a general audience, and this year's show does all of these, writes AIDAN DUNNE
THIS YEAR’S RHA Annual Exhibition, the 179th, follows a mere six months after last year’s, which had been postponed to allow for the drastic and surprisingly successful remodelling of the academy’s Ely Place building. To follow up one huge exhibition so quickly with another might seem rash given the state of the economy, particularly considering the disappointing sales last time around, but it was the right thing to do. The annual exhibition’s natural slot in the calendar is now, and it’s best to get it back on track. Early signs are that the commercial environment is still challenging, to put it mildly, but the show itself is very good.
In fact it’s probably better than last year’s, partly because the building has settled down a little. Perhaps the academicians have settled into it a bit more as well, including Liam Belton, who takes on the Herculean task of hanging the show. With so much work, options are limited, but he has much better spaces to work with than he did before project architect Finghín Curraoin set about what he termed “the surgery”. It would be a little unfair to describe the Gallagher Gallery in its prior, intermediate phase, as a sow’s ear, but it was a long way from being the silk purse of a building it is now.
Exhibition spaces and facilities have all been immeasurably enhanced and the place is a pleasure to visit. Of course, as Stephen McKenna, president of the RHA, notes in his preface to the catalogue, the development of the Ely Place site is still an unfinished story, largely due to “a series of not unforeseen events in the economic sphere”. Apart from drastically inhibiting public and private sponsorship, the recession has put a severe damper on sales.
That matters not only to individual artists but to the academy as an institution. The annual exhibitions have traditionally sold very well and been a major source of funding. Sadly, several staff positions have been cut, and programming has been curtailed, with fewer shows each with longer runs. In recognition of current difficulties, members are ceding a higher percentage on sales of their work to the academy – something that doesn’t apply to the work of non-members.
It would be wrong, though, to dwell on setbacks or difficulties. Since the 1980s the RHA has gone through an extraordinary process of reinvention, and not by accident. The talents and commitment of a large number of people have been involved, people representative of a broad range of artistic views and priorities. In fact, that breadth of opinion and talent has been central to the academy’s success. If its governance had been confined to a narrow, conservative definition of artistic style, it would have languished regardless of whatever materials or resources it managed to attract. But, as with the Royal Academy in London, it has evolved to serve a much wider artistic constituency.
As members, associates and guests, it now includes such un-academic figures as an abstract painter (Richard Gorman), something once unheard of, and an artist previously identified as aligned with an artistic faction strongly opposed to the academy (Michael Cullen).
Then there’s the admission of photography as an art. Times have changed, and so has the institution, even as its commitment to traditional media and genres has been re-affirmed by a new generation of artists, albeit in a more pluralistic context. Over the past decade or so, the RHA has even managed to leave both Imma and the Hugh Lane Gallery lagging behind with its energetic programming of contemporary Irish art.
The Annual Exhibition, though, is something else again. It needs to remain populist, to be inclusive, to attract a general audience, and on the whole it does all of the above. It can’t be completely inclusive, and The Bad Art Gallery’s RHA Unselected exhibition is instructive in that regard, giving us the opportunity to see at least some of what didn’t make it in. While the RHA Selection Committee is broadly based – 18 members this year, including Diana Copperwhite and Eithne Jordan – it faces practical constraints. Some of the outstanding names in the Unselected show, including Jonathon Dalton, Elke Thonnes and Aindreas Scholz, also feature in the official exhibition. They obviously submitted several works for consideration, but there just isn’t enough room for everything that might merit a place.
FORMAL PUBLIC portraiture is an essential part of the academic tradition. There isn’t that much, as it happens, though Carey Clarke has a benignly classical study of Garret FitzGerald in his capacity as chancellor of the NUI, and James Hanley (the outgoing secretary of the RHA) takes a characteristically more regimented approach to his subjects, one of them former Army chief of staff, Lt Gen David Stapleton – Hanley must be a busy man, certainly the busiest portrait painter in the country at the moment. Altogether less formal, there are many fine, more personal portraits, including works by Maeve McCarthy, Michael O’Dea, Comhghall Casey and Lol Hardiman. Robert Ballagh shows the latest instalment in his decades-long series of cheeky self-portraits. One could add Amelia Stein’s series of photographs, portraits of artists by default in that the images are detailed views of their studios.
Photography per se is qualitatively strong, though feels dispersed. Scholz’s toytown view of the Forty Foot is striking. Jackie Nickerson’s muddy rural landscape, which won the Curtin O’Donoghue Photography Prize, is compelling, while managing to avoid every landscape cliché in the book. Her other work, a study of a girl, is equally strong. Ulla Schildt, Paul Seawright, Gary Coyle, Martin Healy and Victor Sloan all employ photography with great sophistication as a means to an end.
It wasn’t always so, but one can say with confidence that there is a lot of very good painting, a great deal of it falling neatly or loosely under the heading of landscape. David Crone’s Field Overview is exceptional, Brett McEntagart’s Flooded Fields stands out among his pieces, and Malachy Costello’s view of winter fields is an impressive piece of work. Equally worthy of mention are Oliver Comerford, Eithne Jordan, Veronica Bolay, Pat Harris, Donald Teskey, Mike Fitzharris, Gwen O’Dowd, Niall Wright (a particularly good Kerry study), Berni Masterson, Keith Wilson, Gabhann Dunne, Ulrich Vogl, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Martin Gale, Bernadette Kiely, Anita Shelbourne, Marc Reilly, Willie Evesson, George Potter, Gillian Lawler, Vanessa Gardiner – actually, too many to list. Representational paintings that don’t fit into a precise genre feature strongly, including pieces by Sheila Rennick, Paddy McCann, Mark O’Kelly, Simon English, Genieve Figgis, Thomas Brezing and Colin Martin.
VEER TOWARDS abstraction and the work is also formidable, with notable paintings by Alison Pilkington, Bridget Flannery, John Noel Smith, Samuel Walsh (an interesting change of direction?), Makiko Nakamura, Marie Hanlon and Richard Gorman. Among the graphic work, Joe Dunne, Niall Naessens, Pamela Leonard, Arno Kramer, Jennifer Cunningham, Gary Coyle, Stephen McKenna, Jim Savage, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Megan Eustace all stand out. Among the sculptural highlights are pieces by John McHugh, Ian Stuart, Janet Mullarney, Michael Quane, Patrick O’Reilly, Remco De Fouw, John Gibbons and Alison Kay. Among personal discoveries I’d count Cormac O’Neill’s light-hearted, painted wood sculpture, and painters Jeanne Masoero and Anthony O’Carroll, both of whom seem to be very accomplished, interesting artists.
The Royal Hibernian Academy 179th Annual Exhibition 2009 is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, until July 25 (free). royalhibernianacademy.ie The RHA Unselected show at the Bad Art Gallery, Francis St, ends June 4. www.thebadartgallery.ie