MICHAEL KANE – Life Story

ed. John O’Regan; afterword by Elizabeth Hatz

ISBN 978 0948037 856     112pp (hb)   30 x 24 cm   105 colour illus

Life Story is an animated and visually provocative installation of 100 paintings by Michael Kane, first exhibited at ev+a 2010 – Ireland’s annual exhibition of contemporary art – in Limerick, which was curated by Elizabeth Hatz. Embarking on this new body of work prompted Kane to take a fresh slant on the recurrent themes of his work over the years. The paintings are rendered in ink, acrylic and collage on newsprint magazine pages, and often incorporate elements of the underlying story. The ephemera that catch the artist’s attention in Life Story are often humorous, melancholy, trivial, satirical or absurd – from the minutiae of an ordinary life to a portrait of a goat that grazed near the artist’s Dublin home. In all the imagery, Kane’s existential message is implicit.

EXTRACT

"It is hard to understand how these works were painted in such short period of time … harder still to recover from the thrilling shock they caused to eye, heart and mind. One just has to sit down, and be swept away. When I first saw them, spread over the floor of the studio, the sheets seemed to have invaded the space straight from the pulsating human flow – yet, at the same time, they imposed the solemn stillness of an epic tapestry. This dual condition is often present in the work of Michael Kane. A muscular male worker in an industrial streetscape is full of sweat and blood, yet statuesque like a Greek god, timeless, even almost distant. All men in one man. It is striking how often the work can come across with such bodily presence, yet hold a nearly monumental, classical self-evidence.
          In Life Story, somehow it all seems amplified. Made on simple newspaper sheets, superimposed on the texts and images of our current media features, playfully and provocatively interfering with this half-hidden layer, these paintings seem to shamelessly acknowledge the potentially enigmatic in the ephemeral everyday. The force of desire is there. The frightful scope of passions – the engine that drives it all – despite reason, or for good reasons – into the hard core of life itself. It is all but safe. It is beyond good and evil … The swift brush strokes, sometimes in teasing dialogue with the newspaper supplement’s photos and texts, make the images fleeting, evocative, cheeky, disdainful, funny and dead serious."

— from the afterword by Elizabeth Hatz

REVIEWS

Kane usually tells stories of everyday life, often his own life, as filtered through the timeless patterns of classical mythology. Hence there is a certain epic quality to his work. His vigorously painted, fast-paced composite offers vignettes of life as lived now, juxtaposing pain and pleasure, beauty and ugliness, spectacle and introspection, all in a rush of multi-layered imagery.  — Aidan Dunne, Irish Times

 Satisfyingly, Life Story is everything an art book should be, with the paintings reproduced to original size and with amazing colour fidelity ... it’s a dazzling show of artistic cleverness and honesty, an artist working at the height of his powers ... Buy – or beg, borrow or steal – a copy of Life Story. You won’t be sorry you did.  — Rosita Sweetman, Sunday Independent

 Not buying this book would be a very foolish thing indeed.  — Anthony Cronin at the launch of Life Story