Jane Irish: A Cosmic Glimpse
Locks Gallery
29 days left
Jane Irish (b. 1955) creates intricate and hallucinatory paintings with confrontations between realms of history that rarely collide. By merging, layering, and melting seemingly distinct visual canons such as decorative design styles and historical imagery, the artist draws attention to how violence resurfaces through tradition and aesthetics.
“Only after thorough inquiry can our ground truths be reformulated in a fully intuitive response: the sky glimpsed through the ceiling, the swirling conflagration that brings us back to the non-distinctness in which we originate.” –Jane Irish
Trained using traditional European painting methods, Jane Irish creates sumptuous architectural and landscape paintings embedded with historical and contemporary images of violence. Often referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s prose poem "Eureka," she seeks to capture the “sublimity of oneness” that transcends geographic and temporal narratives through joining, melting, and evaporating distinct historical references.
Employing quick-drying mediums such as egg tempera, distemper, and gouache, Irish paints alla prima to maintain the vitality of a sketch in each painting. These rich, highly stylized paintings hint at themes of ornamentation, warfare, architecture, and violence, highlighting the cross-temperal interconnectedness of histories whose stories rarely collide.
Melted Interiors
In her interior paintings, Irish combines rococo design styles, imagery from French verdure tapestries and Italian altar sketches, and still lifes of her own surroundings. Some of these paintings layer classical figures with modern-day war protesters and veterans.
"Yellow Room, Study for Save Waller Street" (2007)
As written by art critic Carter Ratcliff, “For Irish, the images of torture and death she extracts from European art history are not just vivid representations of violence and, thus, apt correlatives for the horrors of the Vietnam War, they also speak to what she sees as a much longer history of violence and oppression. She reminds us that cruelty and injustice were rampant during the Renaissance and that we can’t separate masterpieces by the Titan or Carvaggio from that history.”
"Palazzo Romano" (2013)
Hemispheric Opposites
In 2018, Irish was commissioned for a site-specific installation in the historic Lemon Hill mansion in Philadelphia. Transforming the building with a floor-to-ceiling installation of paintings and ceramics, Irish juxtaposed imagery of opposites (past/present, east/west, war/peace) in the walls and ceilings of each floor. Many of her paintings maintain this theme of antipodes, or hemispheric opposites, serving as a rebuttal to linear historical narratives.
Installation view of "Antipodes" commissioned by the Philadelphia Contemporary, 2018
"Antipodes, Yellow Study" (2018)
Transformed Landscapes
Inspired by her activist work with Vietnam War veterans, Irish has made several trips to Vietnam where she paints historical sites and landscapes on-site. These works address the physical and emotional landscapes of the country before and after the war. A number of Irish’s landscape paintings have been exhibited alongside her ornate, poetry-inscribed ceramics, creating a dialogue between the luscious, fertile Vietnamese landscapes and personal accounts of war.
"Central Highlands Dray Sap Falls" (2008)
Irish also painted a number of cityscapes in Vietnam which were battle sites during the Vietnam war, including Hoi An and Buon Ma Thout.
"Hoi An" (2008)
