Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present The Abundance by Margaret Corcoran. This exhibition features new works from her solo show Return to Cythera which was featured earlier this year at The Solstice Arts Centre, Navan.
‘Margaret Corcoran is known for her lively engagement with the western painting tradition. Her 2002 acclaimed exhibition, An Enquiry, pictured her daughter looking at some of the paintings that make up the Milltown bequest in the National Gallery of Ireland… The paintings in An Enquiry demonstrated that she is a conventionally gifted draughtswoman and painter, absolutely at home with representational method. But the last thing she wanted to do was to create pastiches of neoclassical or romantic paintings. She takes a bravura, tremendously free approach in Return to Cythera,building up densely layered networks of imagery – you have to look at each image closely or you will miss much of what’s going on. Sometimes she’ll work a section of a composition to a polished conventional finish, but she always holds back from creating an overall , seamless illusion. There’s a lightness of touch, a very appealing playfulness. When she veers towards abstraction with, say, expanses of saturated colour or flurries of calligraphic brushwork, it is beautifully judged. The historical material she is dealing with becomes a rich, nutritive mass from which she draws not new stories but –as ever- new versions of old stories.’
Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, May 5, 2014.
