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Dublin: Eva Rothschild at Douglas Hyde Gallery CIRCA 113 review
On the wall are seven brightly coloured circular pieces in woven paper, each of which gives a shimmering, mosaic effect - the "dubious" shifting of one colour into another that Burke, giving the example of the plumage of drakes and peacocks, suggested as a mark of the beautiful. Of course, beauty has been a no-no in art since the start of the last century, surviving only on the margins of Modernism in the work of (for example) Bonnard or Jack Yeats. For whatever reasons, truth in modern times has been regarded as more important than beauty (even - or particularly - if it is the truth of horror and destruction, as in Picasso's Guernica ). Eva Rothschild's pictorial pieces have an immediate visual appeal, to an extent evoking the effects of Vasarely or Bridget Riley. More prosaically, the chequered patterns suggest somewhat the fade-ins of a Powerpoint presentation. With names like Little feather , Mehindi , and Alcatraz , they evoke shamanism, New Age-ism, mysticism, psychedelia, hippie-dom, native crafts, the Romantic image of the noble savage, and so on. The work is indulgent and appealing, reflective of a popular counter-culture that owed little to the prim elitism of the modernists and their intellectual defenders. The artist is of a generation that views the sixties with a mixture of historical interest and vague longing for the naive utopianism of that era, and the work reflects that response. If sculpture is - as cynically defined - something that you bump into while trying to look at the pictures, the artist's sculptural pieces bring one up short in more ways than one. In strong contrast to the pictorial images which immediately draw the spectator in, they are stark and angular: like line drawings in three dimensions. In materials including steel, leather, wood, perspex and resin, the sculptural pieces are minimalist and abstract. The contrast with the images on the wall could not be greater. Names for the three-dimensional pieces such as High times , Stalker , and Valley of the kings do not illuminate the meaning very much, and perhaps are not meant to. (The difficulty was exacerbated by the problem of puzzling out which title referred to which piece. Whether this difficulty was intended or not, I wasn't sure.) Irish-born Rothschild has recently achieved some international recognition and it is not difficult to see why. The work cleverly plugs into some of the tensions of the last century, for example between the spare minimalism of abstraction on the one hand and the exuberant expressionism of popular culture on the other.
Artists have been bridging the hi-lo divide since Warhol and Pop Art, and critics like Greenberg and Adorno who defended the autonomous stringencies of modernism have been confined - to an extent - to the margins of intellectual fashion. This artist, however, goes beyond the predictable postmodern concession to the popular by combining the appeal of colour and representation with the austerity of the abstract, the conceptual, the minimal and formal. She thus opens up tensions between modernist austerity on the one hand, and postmodern eclecticism and accessibility on the other. The free-wheeling, 'anything goes' philosophy of the last few decades is undercut by reference to the formal rigours of minimalism and abstraction, and historical tensions are both evoked and re-addressed in the context of a new century. This is quite a clever thing to do. Paul O'Brien ( obrienp@ncad.ie ) teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Eva Rothschild: Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, April - June 2005 Article reproduced from CIRCA 113, Autumn 2005, pp.94-97 [288]
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