Sweet 16 Print Show

Sweet 16 at Urban Retreat Gallery features 16 top Irish and International artists who have worked with Cill Rialaig's own printmaking workshop, Clo Cill Rialaig. The show continues until 26th May 2010 and also includes two special donated works by renowned Irish artist, Patrick Scott.

Angels with Dirty Feet

Current Exhibition at Urban Retreat Gallery; Angels with Dirty Feet

Featuring new work by Katarzyna Gajewska. 19th March to 18th April 2010. Open 12-6 Tuesday to Friday, 12-4 Saturday and Sunday and late opening every Thursday.

These new paintings have been inspired by the ballet, a platform between traditional and contemporary figurative art.

Ballet as one of the oldest forms of human expression coordinated movements with form and color and favored symmetry and dynamic balance.

The artist was trying to translate movement, music and dance expression into form, tone and composition using painting medium as a language.

Inspiration for the paintings was time of transformation and new prominence to ballet, the passage to freedom of expression and dynamics. Katarzyna was excited by the idea of color, balance, harmony of the entire body, and people who brought inventive energy and integrated media into their curricula.
That was the main reason of portraying Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Pina Bausch. Artists throughout history of ballet working outside the academic norm to portray dramatic situations

The rest of the paintings were triggered by famous ballet productions: Icarus, La Sylphide, Scherezade, Swan Lake, The Blue God, The Red Shoes, The Nutcracker, Coppelia, Romeo and Juliet or Firebird. In this body of work rather than illustrating particular ballet representations Katarzyna was trying to focus on her emotions associated with the art of ballet and project them onto paintings. The spaciousness and expressive lines emphasize the dynamics of the figures and embrace metaphor.

Movement, music, color vibrations, light and shade, tonality it was a real inspiration for her paintings.

see http://www.katarinagajewska.com/ for further details