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THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE 26 November 1989

Critic’s Choice
Placed in a gallery context, even a urinal becomes an art object (as Marcel Duchamp demonstrated). Joe Mcgill is happy to apply this treatment to more inconsequential things, like a paper clip, fragment of cotton or twigs, for which he devises a white box setting. Self-taught, a GPA Emerging Artist of 1988, his first one-person show opens tomorrow at Temple Bar.

By Aidan Dunne

 

THE IRISH TIMES, Thursday, December 7, 1989

 

Joe Mcgill at Temple Bar Gallery

ANYONE expecting from his title "The Greatest Show on Earth" that Joe Mcgill will provide a display of hyperbole at his exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery (his first personal one) will be disappointed. For instead of the bravura his title promises, he provides small, neat, low-keyed assemblages in white or very pale colours.
Generally the pieces of carefully composed textures and objects are mounted in glazed boxes with even the small number of actual paintings treated similarly with a centre of textured pigment. Even the objects he includes in many of his compositions are small; for instance the seven tiny dried leaves mounted on equally small fragments of canvas is typical of his procedures, as is its somewhat overblown title of "Famine".
All this excess of presentation of subtle, delicate, even rather precious pieces, how-ever, does not entirely obscure the work of a quite definite personality expressing itself in purely visual terms.

 

By Desmond Mac Avock