Kerlin Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition by Hannah Fitz, Áine McBride, Daniel Rios Rodriguez and Marcel Vidal. Each of these artists will be exhibiting at Kerlin Gallery for the first time. 

Hannah Fitz (b. 1989, Dublin) works predominantly with sculpture and video, making groups of objects that collectively build and break down basic formal identities. Her sculptures often represent familiar or domestic objects, rendered in such a way that reveals their artifice – rejecting sleekness or ‘finish’, they are instead articulated by curling lines and uncertain ‘wobbles’. Painted in different shades of the same murky yellow, as if bathed in the same light, the objects in this exhibition are given a uniformity that unsettles and excludes the viewer. They appear to co-exist in a universe that omits us, reflecting back a familiar yet uneasy version of the world: cigarette smoke curls upwards from an ashtray, suspended in space; a small horse either springs into or is frozen in action. These ambiguous sculptural forms appear suspended in time, acting more like a photograph or drawing than a sculpture.

Áine McBride (b. 1987, Co Donegal) graduated from NCAD in 2016. Her sculptures formally reference domestic, urban and commercial motifs and imagery. The works use photographs of the built environment as their starting point, but undergo various processes of transformation to become fully abstracted sculptural forms. For this exhibition, McBride is creating an L-shaped partition wall with ceramic feet, creating a temporary barrier within the space, alongside smaller works using wood, cast concrete and fired ceramics. McBride’s sculptures embrace open-endedness, deliberately assimilating aspects of their visual landscape and creating an ambiguity between where the sculpture ends and its context begins. She recently completed a site-responsive exhibition in Trinity College’s Arts Block as part of the Douglas Hyde Gallery’s off-site programme.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, Texas) makes semi-figurative paintings that combine images from nature with fantastical visions. The artist works to a small scale, building coarse layers of impasto upon homemade wooden panels in irregular shapes. Often these assemblages bear impromptu frames, built by the artist with frayed strips of rope, nails or copper wire, or introduce a collaged element with found organic detritus – stones, shells, ears of wheat. Rios Rodriguez’s paintings provide an abstracted version of the artist’s personal experiences, and filter the traditional genres of still life, landscape and memento mori through the cosmic lens of American folk art. Though European Modernism and Old Masters inform his work, the artist looks equally towards figures outside of the accepted ‘canon’ of western art history, like the visionary Texan painter Forrest Bess.

Rendered with traditional techniques, the paintings of Marcel Vidal (b. 1986, Dublin) possess a surface beauty, but withhold just enough information to induce an atmosphere of unease: faces are obscured; flowers recoil away; unidentified persons are shielded from our gaze. The paintings find a more disruptive counterpoint in Vidal’s sculptures – plinth-like forms on castor wheels, painted/spraypainted black and bolted together with zinc-plated coach screws. Framed black and white watercolours are attached to the plinths with bitumen tape while messy, volatile assemblages sit on top; built from strips of wood, expanding foam, fur pelts and deer hooves, they appear to claw for the air around them. These two intertwining and opposing stands of Vidal’s practice, painting and sculpture, are in constant dialogue, elucidating a tension between reservation/expression, silence/noise, light/dark.