FAILTE | WELCOME

Curator's Notes

A couple of years ago now, for a group exhibit at Carrickahowley Gallery, I commented that Syra Larkin’s work had resonances for me with the work of Dine’ artist R.C. Gorman. Gorman, often referred to as the “Picasso of Native American Art,” created a body of work that blended the training he received at Mexico City College with the Mexican muralists in the Social Realist tradition (that he says influenced him greatly) and with traditions in Dine’ culture. His was, in this sense, a contemporary fusion of European modernism with traditional artistic forms and focus, just as those Mexican muralists had been. Here, the word “traditional” can be misleading, however. Often used as a “flattening” term by art historians (usually from the colonial centers), the idea of the traditional has haunted European modernism for a century or more, and has led to any number of appropriations and reworkings, exchanges and neo-colonialist erasures. The Primitive in modernist art is just one example of such hauntings, from the astonishment of the caves at Lascaux by Artists-Once-Known to the work of contemporary Indigenous artists, the idea of the traditional and the “primitive” art of those “outside” of the main centers of artistic production and art history has been fetishized and Othered, and also kept alive and in dialogue with these communities and their resistances. In Latin American art of the 1940s through 1980s, this led to numerous re-workings of the traditions and the colonial violence surrounding them, as artists throughout the Other Americas began to revise and re-envision, re-center and re-work the relationship between colonial misrepresentations and imaginings and the cultures of those colonized. In what art historians refer to as an act of “cannibalism,” European modernism was re-appropriated, re-claimed, and re-directed. Artists such as Jesus Soto, Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), and Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica re-imagined a new form of artistic practice, creating such movements as Constructive Universalism, Kinetic Art, and many others. Gorman is, in some ways, linked to such re-imagings, such new hybrid art, creating forms that link modernism with contemporary dialogue with the traditional now largely freed from its flattening denigrations. Figures relate to their environment in ways pioneered by the muralists in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, fluid forms sing of an interdependency between human and their environment. Biomorphic relation signifies a relation between the audience and artistic practice, a kind of togetherness that becomes a totemic poetry of environmental exchange: All forms of life are connected intimately. So, too, does Irish art in its own modernist phase experiment with such relations, with such exchanges, and with such hybridities. From Jack Yeats to Eavan Boland, from Mainie Jellett to The Pogues, Irish art seems entirely permeated (at least since the Celtic Renaissance of the early twentieth century), with such dialogue between trad and modern, between ancient and present, between Self and Other, and between the land and the figure. Syra Larkin’s art is, therefore, part of a much larger relationship between what artists might call a figurative “figure and ground.” And, like so many contemporary artists globally, her art is in dialogue with the very space of the in-between. The interstice. The ground that supports all of life, including human. To take in Syra Larkin’s work is to be placed in this in-between space, and to be collapsed at the same time into the hybrid relation between beings and space, between human and environment, between the Other and other Others, between who we are and who we might need to become, again. Hers is an art of urgent appeal, of a passionate reminder of our inter-connectedness, of a new and ancient sense of “our” multiple and diverse worlds. Hers is an art of responsibility for this environment, of what we now term environmental justice in the largest sense of that term, and of a responsibility for our various “pasts.” Her paintings speak to us of an ancient role of stewardship, of care and tenderness, of communion and compassion, and of the threnody of our current crises. Tragic and celebrational both, Syra Larkin’s work is both Irish (whatever that term may mean) and global, both singularly localized in a spirit of place and dynamically centrifugal in its connection to other places, other spaces and times. This is not to say that it is attempting universality—but it does suture in a way that much of global contemporary art sutures things once sundered by histories of extraction, possession, erasure and misrepresentation. And it does so in a remarkable poetry of the simplified and a grammar of cohesion. To look at a Syra Larkin painting is to gaze upon the threads of the web of life and history both. It is, in my estimation, perhaps some of the most moving and honest expressionism out there today, an expressionism that does not speak for any one group or Self, but for Otherness itself, and of the need to recognize what we may have so severely forgotten. 30,000 years of humans painting themselves and their environment may signal the oldest human activity and our most ancient connections. And, they may signal that the hauntings of the past are not hauntings at all: they are our contemporary present. It is in this mythic relation that Syra Larkin’s paintings stand as reminders and as road signs. In them we are all called to see again, with courage and commitment, our human story and our terrestrial relations. Trad pop? Maybe. But more powerfully, trad rad. Syra’s painting wants you to radically re-position yourself. To pierce the veils that separate us. All of “us.” What better painter for Samhain? Carrickahowley Gallery is honored to exhibit the work of Syra Larkin for our Samhain 2024 exhibit. Envelope yourself in her work as it envelopes you.

Robin Savage, Curator

SYRA LARKIN

LARKIN | ARTIST STATEMENT

I live in Ireland (The Land of Saints & Scholars), although I certainly make no claims to being either. It is a land where creativity in all the arts: music, theatre, visual art & literature flourish.

The climate and the landscape induce introspection, creating an emotional awareness that I try to channel into both my art and poetry. Art can help us focus our attention and intensify our response to what we have and might lose if we do not take care of all we have been entrusted.

I would like to feel in some quiet way that my art portrays the fragility, the complexity, the beauty of our lives and our surroundings both or which are deeply intertwined.

The figures in the work are integrated into their surroundings, many of them form part of it, they are guardians, they are wise, and they are trying to tell us not to turn away.

I studied at Hammersmith College of Art London, qualifying with merit. I have taken part in many exhibitions in Ireland and Internationally. Recent exhibitions include

• 2023: Work featured in Anthology Magazine. Art Cover Contest.

• Feile Na Bealtaine, Exhibition Dingle.

• 2023: Work on screen at The Art Expo New York.

• Work on Screen at Basel Expo, Basel.

• 2024 Finalist in The Art Boxy Venetian 2.0

• 2024 Finalist Group Show at The Capriarte Gallery Venice.

• 2024 Kenmare Open Selection Windows Exhibition.

syralarkinart.com | @syralisbeth | facebook.com/syra.larkin

FEATURETTE | THE MODERNS

The Moderns presents a survey of Irish Art from the 1900s to the 1970s, covering the whole period of what is widely referred to as Modernism. It is a period which extends from Roderic O’Conor and William Leech to Sean Scully and James Coleman. During these years the idea of progress was unquestionable, generating constant and radical formal innovations in the arts giving rise to movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and different forms of abstraction. This course began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after the appearance of Conceptual Art, when meaning was seen as something as important as form, a situation which still pertains today. It has very often been said that Modernism did not really happen in Ireland, but clearly a lot of the best art produced here demonstrates a knowledge and awareness of international ideas, even if those were filtered through or tinted with local myths, beliefs, traditions, history or politics.

The exhibition occupies all the first floor of the Royal Hospital as well as the Gordon Lambert Galleries on the ground floor, and in sheer scale is one of the most ambitious projects ever organised by IMMA. The Moderns is also a multi-disciplinary exhibition, presenting more or less chronologically developments in architecture, design, film, literature and music, as well as visual arts. Some major figures and movements have dedicated spaces in the show such as J.M. Synge, Eileen Gray, Mainie Jellett and Cubism, Jack B. Yeats, Social Realism, Surrealism, Louis le Brocquy, Samuel Beckett – whose only film we present as a major work in the visual arts canon; William Scott, Scott Tallon Walker; Patrick Scott, Kinetic Art, Brian O’Doherty, Pop Art, James Coleman and Michael Craig-Martin and the beginning of Conceptualism. The Moderns focus is on the arts in Ireland, but also includes some works of non-Irish artists, whose influence has had special relevance to what was being done here, such as Oskar Kokoschka, Giorgio de Chirico, Lucian Freud, Pierre Soulages and Patrick Caulfield.

Enrique Juncosa
Director, IMMA.

View the full exhibition guide (PDF)