A treat for visual art lovers is on its way, courtesy of Dublin Gallery Weekend. Kaavya Butaney points out some highlights and has a quick catch up with Dublin sculptor Corban Walker about his latest exhibition and the inherent value that Dublin Gallery Weekend brings to the Arts community.
From dawn to dusk and even beyond, Dublin will boast 60-plus events as a part of its annual Gallery Weekend, happening Nov 6th-9th. Hosted by the Contemporary Art Gallery Association, the exhibits and events will range from rising stars’ provocative and fresh work to show-stoppers from household names, and everything will be free and accessible.
Now in its third year, DGW aims to to amplify Irish contemporary art not just in the ten included galleries, but beyond. There’s so many highlights it’s impossible to list them all but we are especially excited by the SO Fine Art Editions presentation of 40 Irish and Japanese printmakers’ reply to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 Kwaidan which includes works by Richard Gorman, Alice Maher, Amelia Stein, Kanami Hano, O JUN, Shoji Miyamoto, Katsutoshi Yuasa et.al, while over at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Japanese Irish artist Atsushi Kaga has transformed the space into a seasonal temple to draw the visitor into an alternative world combining manga/anime with Western history.
Similarly creating new realities, at the Oliver Sears Gallery, David Eager Mayer presents Empire, knitting botanicals and colonialism into introspective, quiet artworks. Sprawling thousands of kilometers and multiple cultures, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña is hosting her first solo Irish exhibition at IMMA tackling human connection and ancestry, and environmental urgency as inspired by her historical ties to the isle.
Also traversing the difficult relationship between earth and humankind, Geraldine O’Neill is layering objects through time and personal collection into large-scale compositions at Kevin Kavanagh. Traveling back in time, the National Gallery is exploring Pablo Picasso’s life through his historical studios and five decades of French glass-maker Maurice Marinot’s masterpieces. And paying homage to the giants, the Olivier Cornet will host tributes to greats from Caravaggio to Sol LeWitt.
Plenty of other events will sprawl across the city, including Irish sculptor Corban Walker’s musings on architecture and space as influenced by his life experienced with reduced mobility. Walker has been featured globally in museums such as the Guggenheim in New York, as well as in the IMMA as well as in public spaces, such as his work “Bushy” in Bushy Park, Dublin.
“Resist”, his exhibition at Solomon Fine Art will run until November 13th.
“A lot of the work has been about building these constructs that are sculptures that are made by hand, but using kind of everyday or industrial objects that are off the shelf, and that this system of stacking, which is, which is fundamentally about breaking down the means of creating an object,” Walker said.
His sculptures are most often made of multiple parts with no adherence so in transit or reinstallation, they’re often a different shape. At the core of his work is an understanding of systems of power and their exclusive and dangerous effects but in the last few years, his stacks have begun to more specifically reflect atrocities like the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza.
“Why I’m doing this kind of work is to make people aware and to say something about it, to comment about it,” he said. “Because it really needs to be talked about and really needs to be addressed head on, in terms of actually bringing the violence, particularly to an end, and try to bring some sort of reconstruction process in order.”
Walker’s exhibit, like the others involved in Gallery Weekend, will be public and completely free and he will be speaking at an event with a journalist about his work. Last year, he was on a panel and said Gallery Weekend was refreshing and organized, turning attention onto how to help the Irish contemporary visual arts thrive and grow.
“The contemporary visual arts in Ireland, every visual arts group or world, it’s a very small community,” he said. “It thrives, and it’s very good, and it does very good, high quality shows and all that. And there are very good artists, but it’s quite limited in the sense that it’s just in this very small community … I think Gallery Weekend is a really good way of trying to expand that community and information flow of the knowledge of what’s going on around us.”
Words: Kaavya Butaney
Feature Image: Corban Walker, Untitled (Obliterated) 2000-2025 C. Patinated Bronze wrapped in cloth, Ash wood 15 x 116 x 25.5 cm courtesy of Solomon Fine Art
