Patrick Jolley
22 March–17 May 2013
Opening: 21 March
Book: Patrick Jolley – All that Falls (Gandon Editions 2012) accompanies the exhibition
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Carnegie Building
Pery Square
Limerick
The work of Irish artist Patrick Jolley ranges across film, photography and installation, and has won considerable critical acclaim both in Ireland and abroad. His untimely death at the age of 47 extinguished one of the brightest lights in contemporary Irish art. Jolley lived as he died: travelling, taking photographs and making films. In this exhibition, Limerick City Gallery of Art pays tribute to this extraordinary Irish artist, drawing largely on the artist’s notes for the exhibition, which was to have taken place in 2012.
In his films, Jolley resisted conventional narrative structure, preferring oblique, fragmentary sequences. Within the space of a single photographic image or a short film, he had the ability to conjure up an entire inner, subjective world, a world described as ‘deeply unsettling yet never entirely unfamiliar.’ (Belinda McKeon, Irish Times). His work straddled the complex worlds of visual art and film naturally.
Points of departure for Jolley’s work often lies in those moments where time seems to move abnormally or an atmosphere becomes unnaturally dense or thin. Although dark and redolent with hopelessness, Jolley’s work retains a possibility of the absurd, employing slapstick and macabre humour as effective critical tools. Humour in Jolley’s work can be seen both as a means of relief, and as a strategy to communicate what, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, remains outside of language, while at the same time, invoking cinematic strategies of alienation and subversion.
Paddy Jolley’s work left an enigmatic impression on his audience, with his ‘startling imagery…Literally startling. And all the more so because it included absolutely no commentary on these startling images…. showing in very ways, the actual compelling power of art’ (Gerard Byrne, 2013).
Patrick Jolley (b. 1964, Co Down, Ireland) lived in Ireland, London, New York and Berlin. He lived in Slane, Co Meath until his sudden death in India in January of 2012. Jolley had been selected to take part in the 30th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and had been invited to mount a major retrospective of his work at Limerick City Gallery of Art, now taking place one year after his death. His work was exhibited by institutions including Tate, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the Berlin Biennial; PS1, New York; the Gwangzhou Triennial and Dublin Contemporary. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; the Lyons Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Patrick Jolley – All that Falls (Gandon Editions, 2012) is a book whose subject is this artist’s work which was near completion at the time of his death. With texts by Nicolas de Oliveira & Nicola Oxley, the book is a rigorous testament to Jolley’s work, voice and distinctive personal vision which are omnipresent in its pages. Texts trace the links between Jolley’s work and their wider cultural context, drawing on cinema, literature and philosophy, offering the reader possible vantage points to explore core concepts underpinning his practice. Works discussed and featuring in the LCGA exhibition include The Door Ajar, 2012, Here After, 2004, Burn, 2001 and The Drowning Room, 2000 along with digital and analogue photography.
