The Consideration of the Planets

Patrick O’Reilly

An exhibition of new work by Dublin based artist Patrick O’Reilly. Works include installations, bronzes, paintings and photography. Throughout his career, O’Reilly has often sought to look at the big questions by using dramatic props. By taking familiar objects, distorting them, making them from unusual materials or placing them in uncustomary situations the focus is shifted, sometimes shockingly, on an otherwise ordinary object.

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The keystone of the exhibition is an installation that remains in the artist’s studio, a desanctified church in Drumcondra. Here he has constructed a thirty foot haystack inspired by the conical shape that so allured the impressionists, Monet especially. In the gallery there is a smaller haystack, large photographs of the main stack and a collection of new bronzes and installations embracing O’Reilly’s passion of expressing human emotion through the guise of the teddy bear, an alter ego.

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To cap this unusually creative period for the artist is a cycle of paintings made with oil on melamine, a natural product used in work surfaces. The compositions range from trees, landscapes to pure abstract shapes that lend successfully to the atmosphere of the exhibition.