Dwelling Series I - V
Artist
Oliver Comerford
(b. 1967)
Date1996
MediumOil on board
DimensionsEach: 29.1 x 44.5 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Purchased, 1996.
© Oliver Comerford.
Object number1889
DescriptionOliver Comerford studied art in London and Dublin, citing among his influences American social realist painters such as John Sloan (1871-1951), photography and film. He travelled frequently between America and Ireland during the 1990s, visiting downtown areas in cities such as Detroit, which heightened his awareness of the urban environment. His work frequently evokes our modern experience of urban space, through which we often travel at such speed that we have little time to register our surroundings. Dwelling Series I-V has a cinematic quality suggested by the ordering of the five paintings into a single, horizontal sequence. It recalls the road movie, yet the 'journey' remains incoherent. Links between specific paintings are implied by common subject matter or handling, but Comerford deliberately leaves the mode of transport and specific locations ambiguous, encouraging us to engage with more universal ideas of motion and transience in the urban landscape. As in many of his paintings, the subject matter of Dwelling Series draws on the thousands of photographs he has taken over the past twenty years. His use of board as the support, to which oil paint is thinly applied, results in an emphatically flat surface further recalling the photographic image.
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