The Abstract Artist We’re Emulating This Spring/Summer

Abstract art is influencing our interiors in a big way this season, allowing us to escape reality with?audacious brush strokes, conspicuous colour and indefinite forms.?

In our fresh and fabulous current March-April issue, we introduce the six influential new interiors looks you need to know about – each with a strong artistic influence. One of our favourites, the trend towards all things abstract, conveys a sense of whimsy and a playful disregard for rules of all varieties.

Abstract art at its most extreme possesses almost limitless potential for interpretation, allowing it to be incorporated into any individualised interior scheme. At the other end of the spectrum, fractured geometrics, free-flowing lines and Expressionist designs reinterpret familiar patterns in new ways.

One artist in particular we’re looking to for inspiration is Dublin-born Richard Gorman, whose?exhibition of new work on Echizen kozo?washi paper will go on display at Kerlin Gallery this week.

Titled?Iwano?in recognition of Iwano Heizaburo, a master paper producer with?whom Gorman worked closely until Iwano’s death earlier this year, the exhibition is Gorman’s most ambitious body of work on paper so far. The remarkable?culmination of over two decades of collaboration with the Iwano paper factory, it?brings together a series of colourful paper diptychs, produced on an?unprecedentedly large scale.

Measuring 275 x 320cm each, the works? expanded size?lends them a new monumentality, but also a delicacy and fragility; their format?evoking emaki, the historic Japanese tradition of painting and calligraphy on scrolls. Each work from the series uses the same repeating geometric motif, playfully titled??Squeeze?, in an attuned but unexpected selection of colours, chosen, Gorman says,??not randomly, but intuitively?.

The?exhibition precedes of an eventful summer for Gorman, who will mark his 70th?birthday on 29 May with a major solo exhibition in Castletown House, Co. Kildare.

Iwano will run at Kerlin Gallery from?16 March-7 May 2016.?For further information, please contact Rosa Abbott, rosa@kerlin.ie.