Interesting Times

Artist Charles Cullen (b. 1939)

Date1984

MediumMixed media on paper

Dimensions145 x 111 cm

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 1997. © Charles Cullen.

Object number1912

DescriptionCharles Cullen is a superb draughtsman whose artist's eye provides insights on urban life. Working mainly on an intimate scale, he excels at portraiture and successfully conveys a variety of emotions with an economy of means and a use of line which one writer has likened to an exposed and sensitive nerve. A major influence on all his output has been his obsession with 1930s German art and photomontage especially that of Georg Grosz and Horst Janssen, whose imaginative explorations into the grotesque have impressed Cullen.

Interesting Times is one of a number of works from the 1980s, which are characterised by a Dadaist cacophony of nightlife excesses and dissolute characters. Violence as a subject features overtly in Cullen's work of this period not just through of guns, knives and rottweilers but it is also inferred through the distortion of images, fractured composition and obsessive slashing and jittery lines. Interesting Times, as with much of Cullen's work, also acknowledges a debt to the images and sensations of Nighttown from the Circe chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Formerly Head of Painting at the National College of Art and Design, Cullen had a major mid-career retrospective at the Hugh Lane in 1997.

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