Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Them, an exhibition of new painting, sculpture and work on paper by Guggi.

Across paintings on canvas and paper, the artist builds up fields of intense colour layered with the bold, curving outlines of simple vessels and smudgy, broken crosses. Meanwhile, in the titular painting, Them, two linear forms ascend on the left-hand side of the picture plane – abstract and totem-like motifs that represent the artist’s late parents. Layered over four pencil-drawn bowls, a gossamer wash of white paint, and the coarse, jagged finish of the paper itself, the figures enter a dynamic but harmonious relationship with shape, line, gesture, and colour.

Guggi
b. 1959, Dublin, Ireland.
Guggi lives and works in Dublin.

An artist working with drawing, painting and sculpture, Guggi digs deep into a personal yet universal subject matter: the quotidian beauty of household objects. He committedly revisits his signature motifs of bowls, jugs and vessels, using repetition and abstraction to conjure an almost meditative state. In his paintings and works on paper, their forms appear tentative: broken outlines against resonant washes of abstract colour. And yet when Guggi continues his investigations as sculpture, these humble instruments are bestowed with a renewed majesty and power: polished bronze or fibreglass forms that seem to harness and heighten energy, with the simplicity and timelessness of prehistoric artefacts. Connecting both approaches is a sense of openness and fluidity, an attentiveness to prosaic details. “By salvaging beauty from distress, soulfulness from fragmentation,” writes historian and art critic Kelly Grovier, “Guggi creates objects from another world … Fragile yet enduring, they echo an esoteric tradition of shattered urns, jars, and cups that date back centuries – perennial metaphors for the breaking of forms necessary for the release of creativity.”