Opening Reception Friday 21 September 5 – 9pm

Oonagh Young Gallery is pleased to present Colophon by Irish artist Gavin Murphy as part of a two–venue solo exhibition of new work On Seeing Only Totally New Things. Running concurrently at The Royal Hibernian Academy is the film Something New Under the Sun.

Colophon contains a distilled series of ‘integral objects’: a text sculpture, a suite of photographs, and other wall–mounted works. A large–scale text piece is based on a section of dialogue from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema, and delivers a monologue on the importance of the new in art. Wavering between confidence, doubt, and despair, it speaks of the burden on the artist in constantly bringing new images and objects into being – suggesting the necessity of responsibility inherent in the creative act.

The work features a specially commissioned typeface¬ – Personal (stencil) – based on Proposal for a Universal Typeface, created by Herbert Bayer between 1925–1930, while director of printing and advertising at the Bauhaus. Designed along reductive–utopian lines, and consisting of only one combined upper and lower case, the geometric, sans–serif Universal existed only as a design and was never actually cast into real type. The new typeface retains Bayer’s reductivist–geometric design principles, yet recasts these into a specific and singular use.

A suite of photographs enlist the words of Pascal, Milan Kundera, and Lewis Mumford to set up a new conversation between texts, while accompnaying coloured discs refer once more to the decisions of the artists’ hand. A notebook is presented as a path away from previous forms, relying on the gallery’s lights to quietly convey new possibilities.

Something New Under the Sun is a film concerning ideas around progress, value, novelty, and our experience and perception of time and the contemporary, via an attempted portrait of the demolished IMCO building, and the work of its chief designer, Oliver P. Bernard. The IMCO building was, during its brief existence, a major landmark on Dublin’s south coast, yet is all but forgotten today. Similarly, the industrial processes that the company carried out, once part of the fabric of everyday life, are entirely undocumented.

EXHIBITION TALK 18th October, 5.30 pm, RHA

To coincide with Gavin Murphy’s exhibition On Seeing Only Totally New Things DoCoMoMo Ireland and RHA present a lecture/talk with a panel featuring Catherine Croft of the C20th Society. DoCoMoMo is the international committee for the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the modern movement. Booking is advised. Please visit www.rhagallery.ie for further details. Supported by the Irish Architecture Foundation.

Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and curator with a long engagement with artist-led projects and collaborative initiatives. He is co–director/curator of the artist–run space, Pallas Projects/Studios, was co-coordinator of House Projects – a series of seven exhibitions in New York, London and Ireland, and was editor of the accompanying 200–page publication. Recent exhibitions include After the Future, eva International, Limerick; and The Golden Bough, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Curated projects include John Smith at Pallas Projects; Martin Healy at Lismore Castle Arts; and the exhibition & publication Automatic (Auto Italia, London & Pallas Projects, Dublin) curated & written with Chris Fite-Wassilak. He is the recipient of various Arts Council awards, and residencies at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin.