Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Siobhán Hapaska.

For this, the artist's first major show in Dublin since the 2001 Venice Biennale, Siobhán Hapaska will present a number of new sculptures and photographs. The work denies any immediate reading, being the complex result of a highly individual sense of wit, remarkable inventiveness and amazing attention to both idea and craft. Employing coconuts, donkeys, palm trees, fake island resorts, dysfunctional jet planes and strange, mutant forms in immaculately finished, opalescent fibreglass Hapaska's new work explores, with humour and pathos, concerns of violence, threat, the need for protection and suggests a restless yearning for an indeterminate elsewhere.

Siobhán Hapaska's first major solo exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1995, introduced the two major strands in her sculptural practice at that time. The show's title piece, 'St Christopher', was a scrupulously naturalistic representation of the patron saint of travellers lugubriously cut off at the knees. Other works, both wall-based and free-standing, resembled nothing on earth, they appeared to have travelled back from an imaginary future. Much of Hapaska's work ever since has referred obliquely to travel and rootlessness. Her early incorporation of sound into her sculptural environments has more recently been complemented by the production of her first film, premiered at the 2001 Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions in recent years at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. She has also participated in various group exhibitions including 'Square' at the Bloomberg space in London, 'Artifice' at the Deste Foundation, Athens and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki and a highly acclaimed three-person exhibition with Charles Long and Ernesto Neto at Magasin 3, Stockholm. Other exhibitions have included 'Wonderful Life', the Lisson Gallery, London, 'Residue', the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 'Plastic', at the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart and at the Stadtische Ausstellungshalle am Hawercamp, Munster in Germany. In 1997 she took part in Documenta X. She won the 1998 Irish Museum of Modern Art/ Glen Dimplex Artists Award, represented Ireland at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and won the Paul Hamlyn award 2003.

For further information please contact Darragh Hogan.