Iced Cream Caramels
Artist
Robert Ballagh
(b. 1943)
Date1970-1971
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions101.6 x 142.3 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Donated by the Contemporary Irish Art Society and Dublin Corporation, 1971.
Object number1322
DescriptionThis painting shows seven sweets, four pink and three grey white on a blue background. The blue combined with a suggestion of wispy clouds gives the impression that the sweets are floating in the air. The sweets, Iced Cream Caramels are placed in a geometric order. Two pink caramels sit on the far left, their cuboid shape angled in such a way as to give the fullest three dimensional sense possible. Beside them are two grey white caramels positioned slightly below and to the right and two more pink ones follow these and finally a single grey white caramel finishes the series. The caramels are all evenly dispersed, but are all confined to the first three-quarters of the painting. A mount surrounds the central panel. The mount is dark blue and has the appearance of crushed velvet.'...by the end of the 1960s, Robert Ballagh was making Pop Art in an Irish idiom, celebrating the brash vulgarity of an emergent consumer culture in hard-edged, stylised images. The implication that the enjoyment of material things was not necessarily bad was almost shocking. But this is not to cast Ballagh as an apostle of materialism per se; he has proved to be a critical observer of Irish society.'
Source: Aidan Dunne, 'An Alternative History of Contemporary Irish Art', SIAR 50 - 50 years of Irish Art from the Collections of the Contemporary Irish Art Society, 2005, p. 23.
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