Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2 Sep 07 - 6 Oct 07




Installation/Drawings

Tom Molloy expands his meditations on the state of the world through the use of timeless symbolism and massive scale. He challenges the viewer to consider current events in light of their condition as images — as representation.

Fall, the centrepiece of Molloy’s new show, comprises a nine-and-a-half-metre-wide watercolour depicting tiny skeletons. Descending from ceiling to floor, they accumulate at the bottom of the paper like falling snow or grey ash. The memory of people plummeting from the burning Twin Towers on 9/11 is inescapable, and the scale of Fall echoes that tragedy’s vastness, both emotional and geopolitical.

In Sweep, he draws images from news photos of clean-up efforts after terrorist bombings around the world. The aftermath of violence proves nearly generic, despite its disparate locations, causes, and effects. Yet, lest we overlook the human toll the violence exacts, Molloy makes it personal, and the artist’s own blood seeps down from behind the drawings’ frames. Covenant is a clear Perspex box enclosing a row of books about current U.S-Middle East politics, ranging from a tome on Al-Qaeda, to Michael Moore’s disquisition on contemporary citizenship.

For over a decade, Tom Molloy has created drawings, collages, photographs, paper sculptures and, more rarely, paintings that examine political and historical events through their representation as visual images. He uses images from popular culture and the news media, as well as from high art and direct observation of the world. We might think of Molloy’s insistence on paper-based mediums in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of Kafka’s works as “minor” literature, a deliberate evasion of dominant modes of address in favour of an art form of resistance.

Molloy’s exhibition Lone Star was recently on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, Texas. He will be the subject of an exhibition at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 2009 and will have a solo exhibition with Galerie Guy Bärtschi Geneva in January 2008. A mid-career survey of his work was held at the Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2005. Molloy is Head of Painting at the Burren College of Art, and his work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Blanton Museum of Art Austin Texas.

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Rubicon Gallery
10 St. Stephens Green
Dublin 2, Ireland
Ireland
TEL : +353 1 670 8055
info@rubicongallery.ie
www.rubicongallery.ie