“Irish Gothic,” a generous survey of Patricia Hurl’s paintings and drawings across the seventy-nine-year-old artist’s career, is by turns enjoyable, poignant, and chilling. One of the few solo exhibitions recently scheduled at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, this welcome retrospective celebrates Hurl’s contribution over four decades to the slow, hard work of making space for women in the patriarchal fields of Irish art, offering well-founded institutional recognition of her ardently feminist artistic stamina and creative courage.
In 1980 – her attitudes and ambitions shaped by seventeen years of marriage and motherhood – Hurl enrolled as a mature student at Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design on the outskirts of Dublin. Carrying, at this time, a heavy burden of private grief following a stillbirth, she began a process of expressive experimentation, rooted in painting but sensitive to the liberating post-medium influence of pioneering feminist art from the United States. . (Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro are declared inspirations.) Thereafter, she took an active role in coordinating the revolutionary action group of women artists in Ireland while cultivating a varied, expansive and exploratory approach to artistic creation, invigorated, in part, by her late-coming desire to create and connect with others in a spirit of openness and urgency. Painting, performance, video, collaborative projects: all, at different times, have borne fruit. Recently, her enduring determination to foster brotherly esprit de corps led her to found another cherished collective: a group of older women artists called, in Gaelic, Na Cailleacha– a term that translates, in various ways, as “witches”, “divine witches” or “wise women”.
“Irish Gothic” focuses on Hurl’s figurative painting, emphasizing his ability to look at the world, and in the mirror, with a controlled and concerned intensity. As the title signals – with its nods to Grant Wood’s supreme vision of austere American domesticity and, more generally, to Ireland’s rich history of grim storytelling (in the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu, Regina Maria Roche , Bram Stoker and others) – these are images born of tension and trauma. Several early works felt immediately unnerving. One shows a young girl in a full-length white First Communion dress standing in front of a man in a dark suit, as if posing for family photos. In Hurl’s odd rendering, however, both characters have barely noticeable features; they look monstrous, ghostly, or both. Moreover, the girl’s traditional dress is an overwhelming and outsized dress, enclosing her small body in an absurd and oppressive structure. Superficially depicting a moment of contented togetherness, this unsettling painting is nonetheless titled ministry of fear1986.
Many other works reflect the forces of faceless authority and the fears of erased identity. Hush goodbye baby, 1985-1986, is a vision of childbirth as serious as one might imagine: framed by darkness, a newborn baby, painted as a mass of creamy spots and blood-red strokes, is held in l by a masked doctor wearing a dark lab coat. The shape of the outline of the child is uncertain, not quite realized; the adult presence is anonymous and intimidating. The Kerry Babies Trial1987 – responding to the harrowing story of Joanne Hayes, wrongfully accused of the 1984 child murder and subjected to interrogation by an all-male state court for eighty-two days – focuses on menacing figures masculinist authority: a mysterious triumvirate of black-capped judges dominating the cluttered canvas.
The face most often seen in “Irish Gothic” is that of Hurl. From early sketches to more purposeful later paintings, such as the “Forensic Self-Portrait” series, 1993, Hurl maintained a strong streak of self-examination, repeatedly striving to see and represent himself again. The results of this commitment recall, in places, the avowed “consciousness of the body” of Maria Lassnig’s self-portrait. Sometimes in later phases there are diminishing returns. The “Warrior” series, 2015–, in which Hurl strikes a range of poses while wearing the mask and helmet of medieval armor, is a disciplined meditation on self-transformation – and psychological self-defense – but it lacks load of anterior joints, looser and more worrisome from personal experience and perspective. Even so, such dressing exercises deserve our attention: they express something of Hurl’s analytical and adventurous vision while emphasizing his preparation for all the battles to come.
