Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Dallas Art Fair 2017.

In Booth A2, the gallery will present a selection of work by Aleana Egan, Liam Gillick, Merlin James, Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Stephen McKenna, William McKeown, Isabel Nolan and Liliane Tomasko.

ALEANA EGAN
b. 1979, Dublin, Ireland

Aleana Egan's art is predominantly intuitive and subjective; she uses simple materials, assembled or barely transformed, to create enigmatic works that have a restrained tone and structure. She groups these pieces into installations that are oddly ambivalent. On the one hand she draws our attention to the way things look, how they settle, sag, curve, or hang. On the other, her forms and shapes act as traces or memories, and as a tentative articulation of shifting responses to remembered places or everyday moments. The rawness and openness of the sentiment or idea that triggered the work is embodied by her carefully manipulated materials. Gaps and absences are at the heart of what Egan does, and this is what makes her work a little puzzling. Similarly, her frequent literary and historical allusions, which are never explained, are reticent and elliptic. Egan does not wish to tell stories or make grand gestures but to find appropriate forms to engender psychological states and memories. For more information on Aleana Egan, click here.

LIAM GILLICK
b. 1964, Aylesbury, England

Liam Gillick is one of the most prominent and important figures to have emerged in
international contemporary art since the mid-1990s. The diverse forms of his art, ranging across sculpture, installation, filmmaking, writing and varied collaborative projects, often allude to pivotal moments in the history of modern and postmodern art. In particular, the profound, dual influence of minimalism and conceptualism is evident both in his recurrent sculptural use of sleek modular forms, strictly colour-coded based on the RAL system, and in his commitment to ‘dematerialised’ modes of practice – his many texts and talks are understood as integral elements of his art. For more information on Liam Gillick, click here.

MERLIN JAMES
b. 1960, Cardiff, UK

Merlin James’ intensively worked and generally small-scale canvases encompass a wide variety of subject matter including empty interiors, rural landscapes, architecture and, more recently, scenes of sexual intimacy. Often distressed, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted, these works refine and renew many of painting's most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture. His apt description of the painterly project of an admired forebear, Alex Katz (James is also an accomplished and widely published critic), is equally applicable to his own practice: he continues to play the grand, complex game of Western painting while reflecting a fully contemporary consciousness of the modern and postmodern disjunctures of history and culture. For more information on Merlin James, click here.

SAMUEL LAURENCE CUNNANE
b. 1989, Co. Kerry, Ireland

Although a self-proclaimed 'documentarian', Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s work holds, in essence, a nuance and aesthetic sensitivity rarely found in contemporary photography these days. The artist’s gaze seems to shy away from the desires and confrontations of the real and the immediate, instead wishing to seek clarity in the ‘in between’, the unnoticed. Tinged with melancholy, these photographs take in the fringes, the build-up, the aftermath; never the moment, never the turmoil, the anger or the ecstasy, just its remnants. For more information on Samuel Laurence Cunnane, click here.

STEPHEN MCKENNA
b. 1939, London

Stephen McKenna, is a painter whose work is difficult to categorize. Since long before his influential solo shows at Modern Art Oxford (1983) and Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1985) McKenna resolutely followed his own path and has remained impervious to changing art fashions. With a scrutinizing gaze and a highly accomplished, idiosyncratic style McKenna’s practice has addressed all the conventional genres that dominate the history of painting. McKenna draws on the hard-won skills and knowledge of the history of painting to create contemporary works that not only never fail to intrigue and question but, not surprisingly, have the wherewithal to stand the test of time. For more information on Stephen McKenna, click here.

WILLIAM MCKEOWN
b. 1962, Tyrone, Northern Ireland

William McKeown was born in Tyrone, 1962, and was living and working in Edinburgh at the time of his death on October 25, 2011. In the 16 years since he first exhibited at Kerlin Gallery, William McKeown developed a body of work that has had a radical and fundamental effect on our understanding of the age-old relationship of art to nature. The foundation of McKeown's work and life was his belief in the primacy of feeling. His paintings took on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, but presented us with so much more; nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. Through subtle gradation of tone, a highly refined use of colour, and his enchanting, 'room' installations, McKeown created moments of exquisite beauty and bliss. He steered our attention not to the distant sky but to the air around us, to the openness of nature, the feeling of our emergence into light and our proximity to the infinite. For more information on William McKeown, click here.

ISABEL NOLAN
b. 1974, Dublin, Ireland

The startling objects of Isabel Nolan’s art take wildly unpredictable forms, but they are at the same time the fully consistent outcomes of a singular, searching artistic sensibility.  Nolan’s works evolve out of almost scholarly processes of investigation – intensive enquiries into cosmological and botanical phenomena, or analytical scrutiny of literary and historical texts. These contrasting means of representing reality (and of comprehending its infinitely various components) provide divergent points of departure for Nolan as she attempts to somehow account for the enduring strangeness of the world, even in its most intimately familiar forms. For more information on Isabel Nolan, click here.  

LILIANE TOMASKO
b. 1967, Switzerland

Liliane Tomasko’s subject matter is rooted in the domestic sphere. Through painting, sculpture and photography, she explores the materiality of objects and their deeper, psychological resonances. Past bodies of work have examined in close detail household objects including dresses, curtains, bags, mattress and sheets. As well as studying the behaviour of different fabric – the way it hangs, drapes, wrinkles and twists – Tomasko invites us to consider the emotional resonances attached to these intimate objects. Human presence is never too far away: the memory of the body, lingering in the fibres of sheets, is palpable in her most recent body of work. Though nocturnal in mood, the study of light is central to Tomasko’s work, alongside her investigations into sleep, language and memory; her fluid, expressive forms tapping into a pre-verbal state of communication based on atmosphere and feeling. For more information on Liliane Tomasko, click here.

For further information or high-res imagery, contact Rosa Abbott, rosa@kerlin.ie.

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