Winter Exhibition 2024
Lavit Gallery, Cork
★★★★☆
The Lavit’s Winter Exhibition is an annual event that celebrates artists and craftspeople alike. The gallery’s director and principal curator, Brian Mac Domhnaill, clearly takes pleasure in the playful dialogue between form and function that is evident throughout the show: the visitor is brought on a journey from abstract illustrations to ornamental sculptures, from sculptures to tasteful ceramics, from ceramics to landscape paintings and so on, cheerily carried along by an exhibition that omits to differentiate between the avant-garde and the utilitarian.
This sense of inclusion is something that the gallery is keen to foster, thinking of “new audiences”, Mac Domhnaill writes, “who will feel the urge to enter the gallery for the first time, enticed by the variety on offer”.
A wide range of experience is on display here, from the emerging artist exhibiting for the first time to the well-established professional. There is even, near the end of the show, a beautiful lithograph by the renowned William Crozier, who died in 2011, depicting a morning landscape in his signature expressionist blues.
Crozier and his estate have a long-standing relationship with the gallery, as do many of the contributors; the artists Tim Goulding, Tom Climent and Roseanne Lynch, for instance, are reliable stars in Lavit’s firmament.
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Goulding offers one of his singular abstracts, Elegy, a warped latticework that pulsates within an encroaching darkness. A graduate of Crawford College of Art and Design, Climent has developed a unique style that garnishes and layers solid structures, often rendered to appear like natural geological formations, with planes of lambent colour. His Jodorowskyian The Mountain Watches Over Me imbues the sky with orchid-purple tones, against which the dreamlike mountain rises. Lynch’s aesthetic is on the opposite side of the spectrum: her photograms are austere experiments in high-contrast black-and-white fractals of light, although the effect of her monochromes resonates with Goulding and Climent’s work, evoking a sense of the phantasmal and otherworldly.
While many contributors have an enduring presence in Lavit’s shows, these annual exhibitions provide the curatorial team with an opportunity to showcase new talent. Louise Neiland, for instance, is among a small group who have migrated into the gallery’s roster for the first time. Neiland is far from inexperienced; one of the interesting consequences of the Lavit’s status as a nonprofit is that traditional private galleries permit their artists to be included in Lavit shows, a licence normally granted only to public galleries and museums.
Neiland, represented by Taylor Galleries in Dublin, has two pieces in the Winter Exhibition, including the magisterial Forgotten Land, a large oil painting that features a sparse landscape in muted greens, overlaid by a subtle, spectral geometry of white lines, like architectural designs for a long distant future.
For those with an eye for the three-dimensional, Aleksandra Kowalczyk’s pair of closed-and-unfolding modular bronze sculptures make an immediate impression, as do Sonja Guenther’s chthonic earthenware.
The Lavit Gallery, incidentally, is trialling a new space to complement the main gallery: Lavit Output, as it has been called, is an exciting addition to Cork’s cultural sector, situated at 64 Patrick Street, in the heart of the city centre. While this is a temporary arrangement, it’s always great to see commercial actors collaborating with the arts community, to offer the public a new way to engage with culture on the streets. Long may it last.
Runs at the Lavit Gallery until Friday, January 17th, 2025
