Lot 23: Charles Tyrrell (b.1950) SLOW TURN, 1987

Charles Tyrrell (b.1950) SLOW TURN, 1987
oil on canvas
signed, titled and dated on reverse
178 by 175cm., 70 by 69in.
Charles Tyrrell was born in Trim, Co Meath, in 1950. He studied at the National College of Art and Design from 1969 to 1974. Trips to the United States, where he was struck by the work of a range of American painters including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and others, encouraged him to work on a scale that was unusually large in Ireland at the time. He quickly established himself as an abstract painter of real boldness and ability. He developed a personal, grid-based pictorial vocabulary based on rhythmic subdivisions of the picture plane, combining textural painting with lines, angles and arcs, an "intuitive geometry." As he remarked in an interview with Brian Fallon in 1993, though, he was not hung up on a purist definition of abstraction: "I do not regard the abstract stance as an entrenched one..."

Having been based in inner city Dublin, in 1984 he moved with his family to live and work in a house overlooking the sea near Allihies on the Beara Peninsula. Exposed to the elements, it's a spectacular setting by any standard, and it's fair to say that it brought Tyrrell into the closest engagement with the landscape that we have seen in his paintings to date. Slow Turn is one of a series of large, square-formatted paintings first exhibited at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 1987 (in a two-person show, with Theo McNab, titled 'Surface and Structure').

All the pictures display the same diagonal pattern, their geometry underpinning passages of beautifully atmospheric textural painting. They don't represent the landscape directly, but they are certainly responsive to its shifting light, its colour and its subtle tonality. As he noted himself at the time: "It is hard not to see my work as landscape but I have not consciously gone after it..." Writing in 1994, Dorothy Walker described this group of paintings as "certainly his finest from that period." In them, Tyrrell acknowledges his debt to some Irish artists, notably Barrie Cooke and Patrick Collins.

Aidan Dunne

April, 2010