National Gallery of Ireland

During a short if profitable visit to Dublin for a SFI meeting on Tuesday/Friday, I had the opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Ireland in my sole hour of free time (as my classy hotel was very close). The building itself is quite nice, being well-inserted between brick houses from the outside, while providing impressive height, space, and light from the inside.

The masterpiece gallery is quite small (unless I missed a floor!), if filled with masterpieces like a painting by Caillebotte I did not know.

The modern art gallery was taken by a temporary (and poorly exposed) exhibit that includes live happenings (five persons wearing monkish outfits standing around a mommy floating in mid-air), tags (!), and two interesting pieces: one was made of several tables filed with piles of books glued together and sculpted, giving an output that looked like 2-D histograms, and reminding me of the fear histograms discussed on  Statisfaction by Julyan a few days ago. (Note the Mathematica book in the last picture!) While I love books very much, I am also quite interested in sculptures involving books, like the one I saw a few years ago where the artist had grown different cereals on opened books: although it may sound like an easy trick (food for thought and all that), the result was amazing and impressive!

The second piece was a beautiful board illuminated by diodes which felts very warm and comforting, maybe in reminiscence of the maternal womb, of candles, or of myriads of galaxies, but very powerful in any case. (I usually dislike constructs involving light, like the neon sculptures of the 80′s, so I started with an a priori against it.) I could have stayed there for hours…