HOMAGE TO MAGRITTE by Robert Ballagh b.1943

Robert Ballagh b.1943HOMAGE TO MAGRITTEAcrylic on 8 panels, each 24" x 24" (61 x 61cm), overall 96" x 48" (244 x 122cm), signed with initals and dated 1973Robert Ballagh began his series of ‘People Looking at Art’ in the late 1960s when he was the most challenging new kid on the block in Irish art. Coming from a background in pop/rock music and a discontinued education in architecture, he brought a new and iconoclastic eye to the art world, not just in Ireland but internationally. From the outset, Ballagh carved a wide gap between himself and the traditionalists in the RHA as well as the cult of international modernist abstraction, favoured by the Arts Council. The ‘Looking at Art’ series was given its first public iteration in the artist’s inaugural exhibition at the Hendriks Gallery in 1972, when it threw Irish critics and collectors into a spin of excitement. It later formed the basis for a commission for a shopping centre in Clonmel in which many of the compositional elements in the paintings here were used. The series provides a visual equivalent to Brian O’Doherty’s[1] ground-breaking essays about how knowledge of art empowers the privileged, who can enjoy it, in clean, white spaces, neatly separated from the vicissitudes of the world outside. For the series Ballagh employed a neo-realist style derived from advertising, and thus, quite shocking to traditionalists. The paintings exposed the crass commercial realities and the crude branding of art works, as ‘a Lichenstein’, ‘an Ellsworth Kelly’, ‘a Hockney’ or ‘a Bridget Riley’, and also pointed out the preciousness of the gallery space, where the audience is generally fashionable but sparse. That first series was an immediate sell out to collectors like Gordon Lambert, the Arts Council and Ronnie Tallon (on behalf of Bank of Ireland) and led to considerable international exposure for the artist.Catherine Marshall, October 2016.[1] Brian O’Doherty, Beyond the White Cube, 1975.In this work the viewer is looking at Renee Magritte’s Le Monde des Image 1950.[1] Brian O’Doherty, Beyond the White Cube, 1975. In this work the viewer is looking at Renee Magritte’s Le Monde des Image 1950.