12 October 2017 - 14 January 2018
Over the past three decades Eithne Jordan has worked from her roots in neo-expressionism and developed her practice into a considered and meditative representation of space and light. Whether it is the darkness of a February afternoon, the reflected light of a fresh snowfall, or the distinctive hue of Halogen Street lights, her paintings are charged with content that is either to come, or else is taking place just out of view. Her work in recent years focuses on the contemporary city, looking at places such as Paris, Rotterdam, Madrid, Vienna, and most recently Dublin.
In her new series of paintings depicting interiors, Jordan invites us to look closely at the multi layered histories woven through the spaces of institutions and public buildings in our cities. Many of these are museums, or historic buildings that often contain art as a backdrop to civic or commercial activities. In Jordan's exhibition at The Hugh Lane, Tableau, her works inhabiting the rooms of Charlemont House, once domestic, now public, become a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art. These paintings, like a strange mirror, are observing us, and reflecting a repetition of lives lived. Jordan is working in the realm of the extraordinary, the humdrum extraordinary, bringing to the fore the details and perspectives of our reality, She creates an idea, not of contrast, but rather of dialogue, an indication of the continuity between the past and the present, between old and modern.
Eithne Jordan was born in Dublin where she studied at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology from 1972-76. She was awarded a DAAD scholarship in 1984 to study at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, where she subsequently lived for several years. Since 1990 she has worked between Languedoc in the south of France and Ireland. Her work is in major public and private collections in Ireland, Europe and the US and she is a member of Aosdana and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
A catalogue on Eithne Jordan's work will be published in November 2017.