The Lavit Gallery

Catherine Barron, Helen Blake, Thomas Brezing, Gabhann Dunne, Vera Klute and Jennifer Trouton

Opening Thursday 9^th November 5-7pm

Thursday 9th November – Saturday 2nd December

The Lavit Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works by Catherine Barron, Helen Blake, Thomas Brezing, Gabhann Dunne, Vera Klute and Jennifer Trouton.

Working with the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin, this exhibition brings six contemporary artists to Cork, to showcase some of the leading names in contemporary Irish art.

Catherine Barron is showing pieces from her series she showed as an exhibition entitled ‘LP’ as well as her work from ‘We Were Here’. Barron’s paintings are photographic in nature. Some are candid family photographs in style, while the others are images taken, with what seems to be a fish-eye lens, both beautifully executed in acrylic ink on a multitude of surfaces, including board, metal and Bakelite, giving the work a distinctive style, and vibrancy.

Helen Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour, engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation guide the evolution of the work, her small, overtly hand-made paintings record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.

Thomas Brezing says that he works ‘against beauty’, believing that too much ‘beauty’ can be a dangerous thing. This drives him to push his paintings till they go ‘off-kilter’. He rotates them, sometimes using the upside down version in the final work. The brushstrokes are thick and there is vigour and a physicality to his method – often throwing paint at his canvasses – enabling chance elements to arise and defying accuracy. His practice owes to a tradition we can trace back to German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism’s concerns for the figurative and fantastical symbolism.

The limpid colour palette in Gabhann Dunne’s work gives it a visionary, almost poetic quality. Topographical features, figures, buildings, and animals emerge from a richly-opaque ground, conjuring a hauntingly-beautiful parallel world. He uses this romantic landscape to critique the marginalization of animal spaces, often appropriating and re-working found imagery to complement his invented narratives.

Vera Klute’s etchings are of immense intricate detail, draw you in, while her oil on canvas makes a wonderful fantastic scene from, what on closer inspection, seems to be a view of a kitchen window. She has had solo exhibitions at the RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin, and the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. She has shown in the group exhibition Rencontres Internationales at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. She won the 2015 Hennessy Portrait Prize, awarded under the auspices of the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Hennessy-Craig Scholarship at the 2015 RHA Annual Show. Her portrait of Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, commissioned by The National Gallery of Ireland, was added to the National Portrait Collection in 2014.

Jennifer Trouton As an artist, Jennifer Trouton is drawn to the oft-overlooked banalities of human existence, dignifying the losses that life inflicts; the lost generations and their culture; childhood innocence subsiding into adolescence; and community-based everyday rituals that are usurped by individualism and isolation. This 'vanishing present' is the constant theme in her work.

With tremendous skill and dexterity, Trouton paints fabric and wallpaper, not just as a mirror of the real world but also as part of a broader narrative, incorporating symbolism and folk-historical imagery into the work. Her mastery of the formal techniques of painting and image-making overlays these subtle narratives, allowing them to emerge slowly over time as the viewer is drawn back into the work again and again.