Folded/Unfolded (2021)
Ciarán Lennon’s ‘Folded/Unfolded’ 1972 exhibition was recreated and restaged at the Golden Thread Gallery in 2021. The work comprises of stretcher-less canvases, raw, stained and painted.
“Lennon’s conceptual work might be considered as an encounter in space with the physical and emotional presence of the audience at its centre.” – Irish Arts Review
The work was donated to the Golden Thread Gallery Collection by the artist.
Lennon's Folded/Unfolded canvas piece was (re)created onsite at the GTG in 2021.
Lennon (born 1947) has been described as ‘one of the most important Irish painters currently working in the field of non-objective art’. Some of his most well-known work is Porous Plane, which originated from his Folded/Unfolded Paintings of 1969–1972.
In 1959 he saw a photograph from Auschwitz of a mound of spectacles taken from prisoners. This encounter had a profound impact on his thinking and feelings. Drawing on the philosophers Wittgenstein and Adorno, Lennon has said: “It was no longer possible for me to continue the tradition of Western painting after the Holocaust.” Lennon had to find another way.
He was chosen to represent Ireland at the 1993 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and in that same year, he was elected to Aosdána (an Irish State honour conferred on artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland).
Lennon’s work has been collected by public and private institutions worldwide, including the Ulster Museum, Belfast; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane; the National Gallery of Ireland; the Fogg Museum of Fine Art, Harvard University, Boston; the Kamarsky Collection, New York and Trinity College, Dublin.
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