The Living and the Dead
15 April – 17 June 2017
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents a solo exhibition of recent works by Mark Swords. For Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Mark Swords has created theatrically staged paintings that have come into being through a series of gestures that juxtapose the idea of making and unmaking. The paintings, often overwhelming in chromatic saturation and design denote the artist’s instinctive knowledge of colour. Layers of mark-making create a screen through which the buried undertones and colours emerge. He consistently moves between abstraction and figuration looking for discoveries and accidents in his works, appropriating painting conventions to create a stylistic collage. The hand-made is a significant element in his practice, printed fabrics are stitched to the canvas creating layers of shapes and forms, while the paint application can be both refined or crudely impasto. Within some of the paintings he has used draped curtains to create a framing device. A painted backdrop pinned to the wall becomes the larger framework for the paintings. These framing devices anchor the work in a celestial sphere creating associations between the paintings while playing with ideas of display and exhibition making, Swords creates a complex mosaic of works that can be viewed as a whole or singularly.
Artist Mark Swords will participate in a public conversation with Programme Curator Mary Cremin, on the occasion of his solo exhibition The living and the dead at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.
Saturday 22 April 2017 | 1pm
