David Eager Maher, Partition, 2023, oil, watercolor and collage on paper, 42 x 29,7 cm
With Children & Flowers, Jarmuschek + Partner presents the second solo exhibition of the Irish artist David Eager Maher at the gallery. In his latest works, David Eager Maher once again masterfully combines empathetic figure drawings and high-contrast, abstracting paintings of a characteristic colour palette on collaged papers. For the first time, the artist has placed specially created text passages underneath his surreal spaces and dreamlike scenes, which always balance between nature and man, and which develop a mysterious but narratively ambiguous relationship to the picture, offering the viewer a new field of tension full of secrets and associations. The end of the world and renewal, reality and fantasy, dystopia and utopia seem to merge in this demanding and impressive series of works.
The art historian and former director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, John Hutchinson, has related the new works to their contemporary context:
[...] It is against this background of unease and disturbance that contemporary art is shaped and defined, and David Eager Maher’s complex paintings reflect the collapse of cultural certainties and conventional social narratives. Nevertheless, there is tenuous but stubborn coherence in his visual stories and theatrical mise-en-scènes; their disparate elements are held together by imagination and a faint sense of hope, connections that may be obscure to the viewer but are surely felt by the artist. They are positioned somewhere between the past and the future. [...]
The full text Distant Fires is available HERE.
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