A good year for the Crawford
A Cork city gallery has taken time to reflect upon a very successful 2022 as it welcomes visitors to an exciting new exhibition.
Since it reopened post Covid-19, the Crawford Art Gallery has welcomed thousands of revellers through its doors to enjoy a wide mix of national and international exhibitions.
In 2022, the gallery featured everything from the experimental ‘Artists’ Film International’ to the remarkable bodies of work in ‘Corban Walker: As Far As I Can See’.
A number of captivating exhibitions based on the gallery’s vibrant national collection were also hosted throughout the year, including ‘Botanica: The Art of Plants’, ‘The Port of Cork Collection’, ‘Odysseys’, ‘As They Must Have Been: Men of the South, 1922-2022’, and ‘Drawing Room’ showcasing some of the highlights of the collection, as well as works rarely seen by the public.
The gallery also opened its new café The Green Room at the Crawford in November, a classic old world dining room that mixes traditional food offerings alongside contemporary trends.
The Crawford’s new exhibition, ‘Other Worlds’ invites visitors to explore visionary Irish artist Harry Clarke’s unique imagination. Opened on 14 December and running until 19 January, the exhibition draws together Clarke’s work with the work of several other artists to consider how visual art participates in world-building.
Renowned for his book illustrations and stained-glass works, Clarke had an extraordinary capacity for conjuring images, often from literary sources, and bringing often romantic or macabre worlds into being.
Curator of the exhibition, Dr Michael Waldron, said: “Harry Clarke was a consummate world-builder and storyteller in the sense that, through his extraordinary work, he visually realised the fictional worlds of John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, and others.
“If we look back a century, 1923 was a busy year for Clarke. He had accepted a commission by Harold Jacob (Jacob’s Biscuits) to create The Eve of St Agnes stained-glass window. The artist’s watercolour studies for these are featured in the exhibition. In that year, he was also making illustrations for Poe’s ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’.”
In addition to Harry Clarke, ‘Other Worlds’ features the work of artists Pauline Bewick, Stephen Brandes, Salvador Dalí, Jan de Fouw, Stanley William Hayter, Brianna Hurley, William Otway McCannell, Xaver Schilling and Noreen Spillane.