Anne Ryan’s ‘off the wall’ paintings leap, dance, crash, and tumble across the gallery space. The figures that Ryan pulls together stretch and intertwine in sculptural cut-out cardboard and collaged canvases, with limbs and profiles emerging and disappearing in a throng of bodies. Paintings are liberated from the confines of a frame, merging together in free-standing constructions, or bursting into fragments across walls.
For this exhibition, Ryan responds to the city nightlife in Temple Bar. Her paintings express the push and pull that takes place within the historic industrial area and cultural quarter, and its psychedelic spiral into a raucous tourist hotspot once the sun goes down. Punk singers, barflies, revellers, gig-goers, ravers, and groups of friends are all depicted in dynamic constellations that celebrate the intrinsic sense of community which is built through subcultures and fandom. Motifs and iconography from pop music, cinema, classical painting and sculpture all collide in dreamlike chaos like a hazy memory of a concert or party.
Ryan also draws upon her experiences of being an Irish emigrant in London since the late 1980s and the connected feelings of displacement and rootlessness. Her work records the entangled relationship between tradition and living heritage in Ireland, with a perspective of distance. City horses and horse-drawn carriages feature strongly in the exhibition, stampeding through time from the artist’s memories of growing up in Limerick in the 60s and 70s. Ryan also incorporates pulp-style paintings of colonial explorers traversing exotic landscapes, and wild-west shootouts, which unravel and complicate the story of Irish diaspora and its legacies throughout history.
Anne Ryan’s recent exhibitions include: Fighting on the Dance Floor, Exeter Phoenix (2023); Sirens (with Sophie von Hellermann), Turner Contemporary, Margate (2021); The City Rises, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2021); Earthly Delites, Hastings Contemporary (2020); Euoī, Euoī, Euoī, Ribot, Milan (2019); A Barbarian at the Gate, greengrassi, London (2017); The Cowboy Paintings, Turps Gallery, London (2017). Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to present Limerick-born Ryan’s first exhibition in Ireland in over twenty years following her show at Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2002.