ArtReview Asia

Yokohama Triennale: Islands, Constellations & Galapagos

Winter 2017

 A parallel form of perspective is provided by Kathy Prendergast’s Atlas (2016) at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse No 1. A hundred road maps of Europe are laid open on trestle tables filling an entire room, each spread inked-out black except for the cities and towns, forming a new kind cartography that rejects notions of borderlines and territory. The volume of atlases becomes a night sky that encourages visitors to search through the tiny specks of civilisation like we would the stars on a clear evening. Both works remind us, through a macroperspective, of our place in Earth’s history.—Fi Churchman

ArtReview

10 exhibitions to see over summer

Summer 2017

Yokohama Triennale, various venues, Yokohama, 4 August – 5 November

Looking positively frequent in comparison, this year’s Yokohama Triennale – three of these for every one of König’s, for those who failed maths – adopts the titular theme of Islands, Constellations & Galapagos, intending thereby to refer to the contradictory nature of our current reality: strongly interconnected on the digital level but also ever more defined geopolitically by protectionism and isolationism, these driven in turn by populism and xenophobia. Aiming to think that through in a city famously defined by a node of connection – its port – the triennale this time convenes some 40 artists or groups from Japan and the rest of the world, fewer than usual in order to give each one something like a solo presentation. An archipelago or constellation of practices, then, to privilege some increasingly familiar terminology. And who’s big in Japan? Biennale stalwarts like Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Ragnar Kjartansson, yes; but also choices such as Irish cross-media artist Kathy Prendergast, Tsuyoshi Ozawa (maker some years ago of a fictional museum of ‘soy sauce paintings’) and sort-of-Young British Artist Alex Hartley.—Martin Herbert

The Irish Times

Art review: unexpected views at ‘Slips and Glimpses’ and the world map reimagined

6 December 2016

[Prendergast] is not prescriptive about the meaning of the maps, but they do invite interpretation. She removes layers of information to bring to the fore an essential truth. The amended maps evoke, for example, a sense of common humanity, emphasising the fact that humans are isolated beings clinging to life on a small planet speeding through a vast darkness. This at a time when borders, divisions, exclusion and sectarianism are all to the fore.—Aidan Dunne

Artforum

Critic's Pick: Kathy Prendergast, Kerlin Gallery

November 2016

Kathy Prendergast has long made a practice of maps. From her 1983 series of watercolors “Body Maps,” which conflated cartography with the female body, to her delicate “City Drawings,” 1992, which won her the Premio Duemila at the 1995 Venice Biennale, she has proven her observation that “all maps are subjective,” with fresh explorations that address naming, control, personal memory, borders, and exclusion.

For Atlas, 2016, Prendergast has laid out one hundred copies of the AA Road Atlas of Europe, each open to a different page, on as many trestle tables. By painstakingly blacking out all but the white dots signifying settlements, she imagines a Europe freed from territories, boundaries, frontiers, and networks of roads and rivers. Instead, each point glows, defiant in the darkness, yet also somehow lonely.

The outlines of Ireland are clear enough, spread across two sets of pages, but navigating around the tables—which are laid out in a rough schematic of the continent, and further into Central Europe—additional moments of darkness appear. Are these voids seas, lakes, national parks, or perhaps just inhospitable places? Presented as a single installation, this is a powerful work—cultural differences are leveled, while the tiny white dots reveal the tenacity of human endeavor. Our relative smallness among mountains and oceans is utterly laid bare.—Gemma Tipton

Art Monthly

Kathy Prendergast, PEER

April 2010

At first sight, you'd be forgiven for surmising that Kathy Prendergast's 'Black Maps' are an attempt to chart the outer regions of the galaxy. Large and austure, these inky works on paper are peppered with white dots, like a starry night sky. Closer insepcection, however, reveals a far more terrestrial concern, for these are, in fact, effaced road maps.—David Trigg

Irish Museum of Modern Art

Kathy Prendergast

2000

Artforum

Although it was billed as a midcareer retrospective, only two of the works included in "The End and the Beginning" dated from before the past three years, but one of these was the result of many years of Herculean labor. Kathy Prendergast has been a notable presence in Irish art since the early '80s, when, as a student, she produced her first map works--a time when the trope of the map was by no means as ubiquitous in contemporary art as it was subsequently to become. The inevitable centerpiece of this show was the most extensive presentation to date of Prendergast's series of pencil drawings of all of the world's capital cities, begun in 1992 and …

- Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith

ART REVIEW; The Irish Struggle For a Visual Poetry To Call Their Own

Kathy Prendergast

1999

The New York Times

Siobhan  Hapaska  is  here,  with  sculptures  in  formed  plastic  whose  surface  perfection  is  as  sleekly  enigmatic  and  as  unsatisfying  as  ever.  And  so  is Kathy  Prendergast,  who  burst  on  the  international  scene  at  the  1995  Venice  Biennale  with  delicate  maps  of  the  world's  capitals.  Here  she  marks time  in  several  senses  of  the  word.

This  time  her  drawings  crowd  together  all  the  world's  lakes  and  rivers,  reducing  explicit  geography  to  seemingly  random  marks.  She  also  shows several  beautifully  wrought  sculptures  that  attempt  to  capture  life's  circular  rhythms  and  sometimes  succeed.

I  recommend  her  ''Grave  Blanket,''  an  intimidating  object  made  with  white  yarn  and  marble  chips,  and  ''The  End  and  the  Beginning  II,''  a  spool of  thread  made  with  three  generations  of  human  hair.  More  obvious  and  less  interesting  is  ''The  End  and  the  Beginning  I,''  which  consists  of  a baby's  bonnet  adorned  with  strands  of  white  hair.

- Roberta Smith

Something More Exciting Than Ordinary Living

Kathy Prendergast

1997

Irish Arts Review

Sometimes you have to know from where it has come because that enriches what it now is but if there is no transformation then there is nothing.

- John McBratney