Come see Irish icons in a new light at Crawford Art Gallery this Christmas
Henry Jones Thaddeus’ Portrait of a Gentleman (Michael Holland) is amongst the portraits that will catch the eye of gallery-goers at ALL EYES ON US at Crawford Art Gallery.
Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?
The famously eerie “Mona Lisa effect” is an illusion you might have encountered in a room with a portrait in it, where the eyes of the portrait seem to follow the viewer around the room.
Crawford Art Gallery’s winter portrait exhibition, ALL EYES ON US, is a salon-style presentation of its portrait collection that invites the public to investigate the phenomenon for themselves.
Just like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, will the eyes of the portraits follow you around the room, to unsettling effect?
ALL EYES ON US combines much-loved favourites from Crawford Art Gallery’s collection, such as Murdo MacLeod’s eye-catching portrait of Roy Keane with a raven’s skull and Victoria Russell’s beguiling portrait of Fiona Shaw, with lesser-known works like Gerald Festus Kelly’s portrait of fascinating Russian author and translator Sasha Kropotkin and Kevin Mooney’s Storyteller, a surprising portrait of Peig Sayers.
If the title of the exhibition seems familiar, that’s because it is indeed the refrain of will.i.am and Britney Spears’ hit song Scream and Shout, exhibition co-curator Michael Waldron says with a smile.
Waldron and his co-curator, Matt Ryan, opted for a salon-style hang of the artworks, a method of displaying art popular in the Parisian salons of the 19th century, where paintings are arranged in multiple tiers, to emphasise the mesmerising effect of the portraits’ eyes and ensure that gallery-goers find themselves constantly under the gaze of the artworks’ subjects.
“If the eyes are the windows to the soul, ALL EYES ON US invites viewers to gaze deep into the souls of figures both familiar and forgotten,” Waldron says. “It invites us to explore who gets to look at whom, prompting questions of power in the process.”
“Viewers themselves are scrutinized by the eyes in dozens of portraits, but what happens when we return their gaze?”
