The Long View
An exhibition of works by Mary McIntyre
The Golden Thread Gallery presents ‘The Long View’ a major solo exhibition of recent photographic works by Mary McIntyre.
Mary McIntyre’s recent work continues to explore prominent themes in contemporary art, in particular space, place and landscape. In this series of new landscape images she investigates both the rural and urban landscape, questioning its relationship to tradition and modernism and the connection between painting and photography.
McIntyre combines the subject matter and the formal aspects of landscape painting, with the technical facilities of contemporary photography. These recent images include representations of urban environments in nocturnal settings, emphasising the qualities of emptiness and stillness that are inherent in the urban environment at night. McIntyre’s work presents us with a series of subtle vistas imbued with a beauty and melancholy present in the paintings of Jacob Van Ruisdael, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work she sites as an influence on her current practice.
In this latest body of work McIntyre re-introduces the human figure having for a number of years produced images devoid of the figure, only making reference to a human presence through other pictorial means by the inclusion of a chair or article or clothing. In these new images, the figure takes on a new role, referencing its allegorical function within landscape painting.
Mary McIntyre has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally to much acclaim and its currently a lecture at Fine Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
Supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council