Kevin Kavanagh presents Scrapyard Carnival, a new installation by Sean Lynch.
As ever, Lynch’s new work evokes the role of narrative and allegory, this time spiraling out of an event in a scrapyard in Clondalkin, on the edge of Dublin City in 2011. There, a repossession company seized a BMW 3 series motor car from notorious Celtic Tiger banker Sean Fitzpatrick, and soon organised an eBay auction where the highest bidder would get the opportunity to crush the vehicle, as a form of revenge for the wrongdoings by the banking sector upon the good people of Ireland. The resulting scene, played out as a carnivalesque drama emphasising a form of folk ritual around the economic recession, is reimagined at Kevin Kavanagh, where a fragment of the actual car, video footage and slide projections all intermingle in the gallery space, alongside a new suite of graphic works released in a special collaboration between Lynch and London-based designer Wayne Daly.
Sean Lynch represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015, along with solo presentations at Modern Art Oxford in 2014 and at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane in 2013, amongst many other exhibitions, publications and projects throughout Europe in recent years. In the last year he has curated exhibitions at Lismore Castle Arts and Flat Time House in London, and will present his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Rose Art Museum in Boston this September.
