Joe Mcgill is a self-taught artist from Dublin. He had his first solo exhibition in Ireland in 1989. This month a prestigious New York gallery will present a show of his work. The gallery is excited. It has already sold two of his paintings and the show hasn't even opened.

Such success in the art world does not happen often. For it to happen to an Irish artist, a country not known for its contribution to modern art and normally considered isolated from mainstream trends, has until now been almost unheard of.

 Mcgill seems to have overcome all the obstacles that often stand in the way of an Irish artist achieving an international reputation. Since his work was first shown at some group shows, Mcgill has  collected a number of hard-core fans who wield influence in the international art scene. Among them are international art critic Dorothy Walker, the former director of the National Gallery in Ireland. Dr. James White, and Joseph Daniel Masheck, a New York art critic and professor of art history at Hofstra University, whose writing in Artforum and Arts Magazine has been the jumping off point for the career of many an artist.

How did someone like Joe Masheck, at the center of the American art scene, even come to hear about the 35-year-old Dubliner?

"I came across Joe's work a couple of years ago when Dorothy Walker sent me a catalogue of new irish art," Masheck said. "Anyway, the catalogue happened to give prices, and since I took immediately to Joe's work, as illustrated, I just sent for a piece. I'd never done anything like that before, buying a work of art by mail. In fact, I must have torn the letter up four or five times before saying to myself, 'Why the hell not?' I've never regretted that move.

"The letter changed life for Mcgill. Interest in his work from abroad made the years of hard work of battling against an inward-looking art hierarchy in Ireland worthwhile. From a working-class background in Crumlin, Mcgill had decided seven years earlier to work as an artist full time. From that time, he made his living from commissions and portraiture. Doing only what he really wanted to do, minimalist conceptual sculptures, would have made paying the mortgage impossible.

The fact that Mcgill had not come through the art school process also made life difficult. It is in art schools that students make the contacts that later lead to their getting scholar-ships, patrons, exhibitions and the other networking knowledge that allow them to advance through the hierarchy. Being self-taught, Mcgill had no grasp of the formal path to success, but with unflagging determination he turned his "late vocation" to his advantage and began to produce highly individualistic works.

 James White, in that his introduction to Mcgill's first solo show, is quite clear about the artist's strength. "In first one-man exhibitions one usually searches for the artists or areas of influence," he said. "In Joe Mcgill's. case, I have a strong feeling that his primary impulse was a desire to get away from all the influences and movements which abound in modem art.

McGill's work is small in size. He uses ordinary pieces of material, such as pieces of metal, plastic or wood, and combines them in wooden frame boxes to create an image tells a tale. Lori Ledis of the LedisFlam Gallery in Soho where the exhibition will open on Thursday April 11, describes the story telling process in Mcgill's work. "Each of the simple objects that he chooses to preserve are actualized in. the frame-box, while when combined they chronicle myths, legends, biblical event's and everyday Irish life," she writes.

A crucifixion occurs in one of Mcgill's works when a swatch is pulled taut by string draped from a weathered twig. That same swatch, when lowered into a black rectangle board from the white angled above, becomes an entombment. It takes only white and black rectangles and a penciled horizontal line for Joe Mcgill to describe a resurrection. According to Ledis, "It is with an ascetic eye that Joe Mcgill sorts through the lost left or forgotten objects and then floats them in a pure white cloud of fresh air." Adds Masheck: "Joe may be a self-taught artist, but his work shares very articulately in the Surrealist tradition of object-construction. Sometimes, all the more in its smallness, it's really amazingly fine."

John O'Mahony

Irish Echo/April 10-16, 1991