David Ireland: Works on Paper at the Telegraph Hill Gallery Extended through May 10

SAN FRANCISCO - May 8, 2015 - PRLog -- The Telegraph Hill Gallery has extended the solo exhibition of San Francisco Bay Area artist David Ireland (1930-2009). The well-received exhibition “The Idea That Nothing Was Something Was In My Thought” will run through May 10, 2015. The show features Ireland’s works on paper dating from the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.

Below is Art Critic Kenneth Baker's Review

A new surge of posthumous appreciation awaits the late David Ireland, what with the recent publication of Constance Lewallen’s “500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House” (UC Press; 120 pages; $29.95) and the anticipated public reopening of the restored house in January.

In the meantime, the Telegraph Hill Gallery brings an unfamiliar selection of Ireland’s frameable works, mostly from the 1990s, into public view from the estate of one of the artist’s siblings.

Critics cite Ireland (1930-2009) as a leading figure in Bay Area conceptual art. He did put much stock in ideas and their consequences, but the term “conceptual art” carries no reminder of the vivid physicality of most of his

One untitled piece here consists of a paper sheet coated with ink heavily enough that the blackened surface has cracked over time into patterns over which Ireland had no control.

Several other pages, layered with black and white enamel, bring to mind the abstract meanders of painter Brice Marden, until a viewer notices that the initials D and I slowly, but wryly, unignorably begin to obtrude as armatures of Ireland’s ostensibly non-signifying features. Ireland liked to toy with the convention of the artist’s signature, especially because his initials were an anagram of “I.D.” — all-but-universal slang for identity.

Several beguiling monotypes pay homage to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), an acknowledged hero of Ireland’s, apparently having been made by dropping pigment-soaked strings onto a page or plate, letting the physics of their falls dictate what we perhaps strain to see as composition. To make that strain felt consciously, and to invite us instead to sense a freedom and pleasure in indeterminacy, seem to have been the point.

Surrender of control and of the constraints of taste pervade Ireland’s art, conspicuously here in two untitled sheets slathered thinly, as if blindly, with yellow plaster.

A single sculptural work betokens the opposite pole of Ireland’s creativity: the exercise of extreme discipline to achieve a desired degree of impersonality. It is what he called a “dumbball,” a grapefruit-size perfect sphere that he formed by tossing a blob of wet cement from hand to rubber-gloved hand hour after hour, for as long as the material might take to pass from real imperfection to ideal sphericity.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic.

 David Ireland: Works on Paper “The Idea That Nothing Was Something Was In My Thought” Through May 10. Telegraph Hill Gallery, 491 Greenwich St., S.F. (415) 767-9794. www.telegraphhillgallery.com