Beschreibung:

Janet Mullarney Red Handed, 1998 Polychrome, wood, wallpaper, mixed media and electric motor, 215 x 80 x 50cm (84½ x 31½ x 19¾") Exhibited: IMMA, SIAR 50, 50 Years of Irish Art from the Collections of the Contemporary Irish Art Society, 2006, illustrated in catalogue (page 59); IMMA, There and Now, Janet Mullarney Retrospective, Works from 1980-2019. Born in Dublin in 1952 Janet Mullarney relocated to Florence, Italy in 1970 and studied at both the Accademia di Belle Arti and Scuola Professionale di Intaglio. Following this period of training Mullarney went on to take an apprenticeship in furniture restoration. This experience would profoundly shaped Mullarneys subsequent practice, equipping her with an array of technical skills and an understanding of the properties of materials, particularly wood, which she has used consistently throughout her career. A succession of exhibitions in Ireland and Italy in the early nineties brought Mullarneys work to prominence. Since then she has continued to forge a unique visual vocabulary and is now without doubt one of the most singular figures in Irish contemporary art. Mullarneys works possess a timeless, universal quality and is directly influenced by her investigations into devotional art from various Western and Non Western sources. Ecclesiastical architecture and statuary from Pre-Renaissance European art are particularly important influences upon Mullarneys work. However, Mullarneys work is also indebted to ideas gleaned from psychoanalysis. All these aforementioned influence may be seen in Red Handed, an exquisite work that exemplifies Mullarneys unique approach and couples Christian iconography with Freudian psychology. The assemblage is a provocative and humorous subversion of the Madonna and Child motif. Rather than the traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary as loving mother her hand appears to be aggressively obscuring the face of the infant, perhaps in an act of exasperation. Closer inspection reveals Madonna is in fact wearing a mask, is literally red handed and therefore possibly guilty of some unspecified act and her halo is made of a roulette wheel. This work exemplifies how in Mullarneys work, what ostensibly appears as familiar reveals itself to be uncanny and unexpected. Red Handed is part of a corpus of work that Mullarney included a solo exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 1996 entitled The Perfect Family. A sculpture that could be described as the sister to Red Handed and is entitled Dietro Le Quinte (Behind the Scenes) can be found in the collection of the Hugh Lane. Mullarney has exhibited extensively in Ireland, Mexico, Italy, China, and the USA and has produced work for public projects include the Waagstraat Project, with architect Adolfo Natalini Gröningen; Royal Victoria Hospitals, Belfast; Saint Ultans Primary School, Cherry Orchard, Dublin, with architects ODonnell & Tuomey. She has also received many prestigious awards including the Pollock Krasner; RHA Sculpture Award; RUA Perpetual Silver Medal and the OMalley Irish American Cultural award. Her work is held in many prominent collections throughout the world she was elected a member of Aosdána in 1999. A major exhibition of Mullarneys took place at the Irish Museum of Art earlier this year and was followed by the publication of the artists catalogue raisonné which details over four decades of her singular work. Pádraic E. Moore