THE WHITE Room Gallery, in the Liosban Industrial Estate will tomorrow open an exhibition entitled 10x10. It will feature 10 new pieces by 10 artists, each measuring 10 inches by 10 inches, and each piece is for sale for €100.
This is an amazing opportunity to buy a piece of art by some of the most exciting artists around at an unbelievable price. At only €100 per piece of work, this is a rare chance for art lovers with a tight budget to get their hands on new and captivating work.
The exhibition features local and national artists with a fine mix of up-and-coming, as well as critically acclaimed and established artists. The line up is Aideen Barry, Felicity Clear, Jennifer Cunningham, Cecilia Danell, Chris Judge, Kevin McCarthy, Tricia McCarthy, Luke McMullen, Shane O’Connor (Sketchy Inc ), and Mary Trait.
It’s a lively and colourful exhibition in which the variety of styles combine to good effect. Even though the artists were given no fixed theme, other than the works measure 10 x 10, it is interesting to see that cityscapes form a recurrent motif, ranging from Jennifer Cunningham’s images of New York’s Coney Island to Cecilia Danell’s views of modernist architecture in Berlin, to Shane O’Connor’s appealing prospects of familiar Galway locations.
There is also a warmly quirky tone to Tricia McCarthy’s pieces, which in this case is somewhat paradoxical as McCarthy is suffering from terminal cancer. Yet her response to this condition has been to imbue her work with a child’s-eye innocence, playfulness, and whimsy that makes for engaging pieces. She is donating proceeds from her sales to Galway Hospice.
Aideen Barry’s works come from her Domestic Harm series and feature drawings of cut fingers, forks being jammed into toasters, and suchlike misadventures, rendered with dark humour.
The remaining artists in the show all contribute eye-catching work; Kevin McCarthy’s landscapes, illustrator Chris Judge’s ‘cartoony’ pieces, Luke McMullen’s spray-painted portraits, some more cityscape/architecture from Felicity Clear, and the colourful, distinctive juxtapositions that form Mary Trait’s compositions.
10 x10 is the first exhibition to be curated by new White Room employee Anna McCarthy. Anna was inspired to put together this exhibition in reaction to the notion that art is not something worth spending money on in times of recession and cut backs.
It is an opportunity to get people back into galleries, not just for free wine, but to get a good deal on new works of art, and start their own art collection.
The exhibition will open in the White Room Gallery tomorrow at 7pm with guest speaker James Harrold, the Galway city arts officer. It will run for the remainder of 2009 and will close in early 2010.
