Return Gallery, Goethe Institute: 9 November-22 December 2005
Curated by Mia Lerm Hayes
Flow and dissolution: paintings on waste and digitally aided prints
Gereon Inger is one of the very few German artists who have been invited to show in the difficult Georgian space of the Goethe Institute’s “Return Gallery”. This is Inger’s second time showing in Dublin. Last Summer, he was participating in the Joyce in Art exhibition at the RHA and was a discovery for many with his “map” of Dublin, whose “watery” surfaces he covered in a dense web (waves and currents) of miniature writing: the first ca. 270 pages of Finnegans Wake, executed over the last ten years. He was also present there with a set of eclectic stamps to be used for “illustrating” Ulysses or covering any other surface.
He returns to Dublin’s “Return” with flow and dissolution, and with miniatures; this time also reacting to Dublin, but in a very different space: The Georgian room’s frescoes, stucco and architectural features are en miniature themselves. That and their “dating” of the context is something, which Gereon Inger chose to appropriate.
It is one of his strategies, also in terms of material and technique – and one that sits well with his host culture in this case: the scribe’s art, miniature painting, printing (if idiosyncratically at times in dust and on dried leaves) have been employed in previous shows, there, however, placed into mundane glass jars, mounted onto fragile bamboo stands, in a bunker or Botanic Garden. Here, he heightens the references to 18th and 19th century culture that the space provides – and he subverts what is at first glance possibly one of the most poetic, aesthetically pleasing shows at the “Return”, where the strategy is not a clash with but a complementing of the surroundings.
There are very contemporary motivations also: ecological issues are pursued with the subtlety that they often demand. In keeping with this, Inger will do a performance in Merrion Square before the opening: hanging fallen leaves back on a tree with silk threads. His contribution is a careful, culturally and historically aware intervention about looking closely, about preserving and renewing, about intuition and intellect, and word and image relations.
If it is odd to find a contemporary artist with a good track record of exhibitions and peer esteem travelling with a couple of cherry stones in his pocket, each inscribed with the Our Father in a different language, one can’t help thinking that this is not an eccentricity that would have been too far removed from what people in Inger’s home region encountered when Irish monks came over there a millennium ago.