Claremorris Gallery will host a new exhibition by award-winning artist Cecilia Danell next month, featuring a body of work inspired by her interest in the push and pull between the natural and the man-made.
Entitled ’A Stillness Expanded’ the selection of paintings by the Galway based artist represents a glimpse of the forrested landscape where she grew up in Sweden, but they could be anywhere.
Through use of colour, sci-fi graphical elements and the focus on remnants symbolising human presence, Danell’s paintings depict scenes that exist between truth and fiction.
He work points to something else and sometimes upending the romantic notion of nature as an untended wilderness.
Living in Galway, for the past decade Cecilia Dannell has returned to her family farm in Sweden to walk and gather research material for paintings
Her work has garnered many awards. She is the 2022 recipient of the RHA Hennessy Craig Award for painting, the ESB Keating Award at the 190th RHA Annual Exhibition, a 2017 Arts Council Next Generation Award and the 2011 Wexford Arts Centre Emergence Award.
Much of the work was created during the pandemic, a time when many of us found our immediate landscapes both strange and familiar at the same time.
Her paintings draw on how both we and our environment adapt, adjust and form new realities after seismic events. Each canvas represents a slice of a bigger world and gives a sense of a portal to a universe larger than what you can see.
While incredibly unique, these paintings have broad appeal especially for those who are connected to nature and want to bring the outside in.
Rosemarie Noone, Claremorris Gallery, said ”The pandemic amplified our natural human impulse to get back to nature, to live in tune with nature, to re-root. Danell’s paintings prompt us to make that connection and examine our relationship with it.”
Danell uses acrylic washes and layers beneath oil paint. Her signature style includes acrylic drips which add velocity and are intended to ‘break the illusion’ to remind us that a painting is a construct. She paints wet on wet, an intense process, taking about three weeks per canvas.
A Stillness Expanded opens at Claremorris Gallery on April 1 and runs until April 15, and thereafter by appointment.
Gallery hours 1 – 6pm, Wednesday to Saturday or by appointment. For more see https://claremorrisgallery.ie/
