Highlanes Gallery and Millenium Court Arts Centre are delighted to announce a new exhibition of paintings by painter Richard Gorman. The exhibition entitled Shuffle opens at Highlanes Gallery in July and then at Millenium Court Arts Centre in October and travels to the Ashford Gallery at the Royal Hibernian Academy in March, 2010.
Richard says of the new work: The paintings I am making at the moment explore the interrelationships with overlapping flat shapes and in turn those relationships with the edge of the picture plane. The oil paint is applied quite flatly on to gessoed linen canvas. April 2009
Gorman was educated in Ireland but has lived and worked in Milan since the 1980s. During that decade, having abandoned the residual figuration of his earliest work, Gorman’s paintings were animated by the frantic surface pace of an anxious line which skittered over or ploughed through impacting plates of muted colour.
Throughout the 90s, however, the role of line drawing receded and his naturally understated gifts as a colourist became even more evident. Since then his work has drawn much of its power from the compositional tension between increasingly prominent and boldly simplified, irregular blocks of colour. Gorman has exhibited widely and regularly since the mid-1980s, especially in Dublin, London, Milan and Tokyo. Frequent and extended visits to Japan have notably influenced his working methods and materials, most memorably in a series of highly successful large-scale works executed on handmade washi paper which he produced in western Japan in 1999. Recent international exhibitions have included solo shows at Itami City Gallery of Art and Mitaka City Art Foundation in Japan in 1999 and the Koriyama Museum, Japan in 2003. Gorman has also, over the past few years, participated in group shows at Der Spiegel Galerie, Cologne; an exhibition of contemporary Irish drawings, A Measured Quietude, which toured the Berkeley Art Museum, California and The Drawing Center, New York; He is represented in many collections, both public and private in Europe, the UK, Ireland and Japan
