Anne Ryan
Tugann an Torann

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, IE
12 January - 10 March 2024

Anne Ryan’s ‘off the wall’ paintings surge with energy, leaping, dancing, crashing, and tumbling across the gallery space. Figures pose, stretch and intertwine in sculptural cut-out cardboard and collaged canvases, their limbs and profiles emerging and disappearing in the 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 work expresses the push and pull that takes place between the orderly gallery, and the psychedelic spiral into a raucous tourist hotspot once the sun goes down outside. A series of silhouetted figures cut from metal sheets line the gallery’s interior windowsill and mirror some of the postures and movements of people beyond the glass in the street. The sharp outlines resemble custom-made signage but are painted in streaky oils with fluidity and immediacy as if painted only moments earlier. Stretching, bending and reclining forms shapeshift stances from Degas’ ballerinas and Cézanne’s sun-dappled bathers, to the advertisements for yoga classes or neon-lit lap dancing clubs in the local area.

The exhibition’s title, Tugann an Torann, is an intentionally imprecise and playful Irish translation of ‘Bring the Noise’. It is a statement of intent to join the raucous dissonance of the city, with Ryan’s own landscape of jostling, mingling and moshing characters. The title in its original language is that of a 1987 Public Enemy song, which advocates for the elevation of the status of rap, and the merging of music genres. It demonstrates that forming alliances across taste, cultures and ideologies is a powerful form of solidarity and protest. Throughout Ryan’s exhibition punk singers, barflies, disco dancers, ravers, bootgirls, rockers, and rockabillies are all depicted in dynamic constellations that celebrate the intrinsic sense of community which is built through subculture and fandom.

Motifs and iconography from pop music, cinema, classical painting, ancient murals, and mythology all collide in dreamlike chaos like a hazy memory of a concert or party. Ryan’s recent wall-based paintings are collaged from layers of cardboard, canvas scraps and cuttings from magazines that are layered, torn, and remounted in dense surfaces. Bodies overlap and fold, and hands and legs extend and reach out from the mass of bodies, like at a rave or festival. These paintings are reminiscent of city hoardings where posters are pasted over and over again, week after week for club nights, gigs and exhibitions, holding an archive of excitement and creativity.

Ryan’s paintings span the gallery in a broken line that resembles a horizon or canyon ridge in a Western film, with the three-dimensional cut-out works placed precariously on plinths that appear to charge or stampede through the gallery. This cinematic panorama calls back to Ryan’s series of ‘ Cowboy Paintings’ made around twenty years ago and includes several scenes of galloping horses from different eras in history, from wild west shootouts, and colonial cavalrymen to ceremonial carriage cortèges. These pulp-style paintings are drawn from the artist’s memories of growing up in Limerick in the 60s and 70s, as well as her experiences as an Irish emigrant in London in the 80s and the connected feelings of displacement and rootlessness.

Ryan’s work records the entangled relationship between tradition and living heritage in Ireland, with a perspective of distance. Rather than dwelling on the bittersweet nostalgia for the ‘good old days’, Ryan embodies the Western archetype of the heroic outsider. The antihero is a drifter, independent and skilful, whose refusal to be connected to a fixed ideology makes them ambiguous and impossible to pin down. This role was also performed by Ryan’s beloved Thin Lizzy, who manifested the characterisation of the cowboy, outlaw and other rebellious personas in several songs, which both claim and complicate ideas about Irish-ness and the story of the Irish diaspora and its legacies throughout history.

In an artist’s talk in 2017, Ryan’s shares some of her inspirations in Western cinema, including directors of Irish heritage, John Ford and Raoul Walsh. Ryan plays a video clip of Walsh talking about writing characters who are always moving in and out of stories and moving to the next adventure. Ryan’s commitment to not committing to a single pathway through her work opens up the possibilities of what a painting is. By being intentionally out of step, by not walking the line, Ryan embraces variety and the mesh of cultures and communities that blurs the notion of a fixed identity and how it is represented.

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.