1 The Wooden Building, Exchange
Street Upper, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Adrienne Symes
'Low Tide at
Varengeville'
February 20 to
March 22
Private
opening: February 20, 7 pm, with guest speaker Rosetta
Beaugendre, Head of Communications, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.
The Olivier Cornet Gallery is delighted to present 'Low Tide
at Varengeville', an
exhibition of new works by
Adrienne Symes
Varengeville-sur-Mer,
the picturesque village close to the sea in the North of France near Dieppe,
has always been an inspiration to many famed artists.
George
Braque, Joan Miró and Claude Monet, to mention but a few, all spent a very
important time of their creative lives there. Miró (1893-1983) began
his ‘Constellations’ series of 23 paintings in Varengeville before having to
leave in late 1940 when the Nazis started bombing Normandy. George Braque (1882-1963)
set
up a workshop in his house in Varengeville-sur-Mer in 1929 and spent most of
his remaining life there. His tomb is held in the churchyard of Saint Valery,
the famous clifftop church which boasts one of his stained-glass works, ‘The
Tree of Jesse’. The Chancel of the Church is bathed
in the blue light diffused by an abstract stained glass window designed by the
Belgian artist Raoul Ubac
(1910-1985),
a friend
of George Braque’s.
Claude
Monet
(1840-1926) also spent some time in Varengeville where he produced a
substantial body of work, amongst which one of his most famous paintings: ‘Low
Tide at Varengeville’.
‘Low
Tide at Varengeville’
is also the title of Adrienne Symes’s exhibition at the Olivier Cornet
Gallery. The paintings on show were part of the exhibition ‘Varengeville – Une
Perspective Irlandaise’ in Varengeville in August 2012 where Symes showed with
other Irish artists including Mary Conliff, Gill Trapnell, Michael Wann and
Lorraine West.
About the artist:
Water
is a recurring theme in Symes’s work, from the large-scale seascapes and
seashores of the West of Ireland and other places, to the intimacy of a rock
pool, a pond or a river bank. The mystery of distortions, reflections and
shapes adds a certain meditative quality to the work.
Adrienne Symes is a graduate of the National College of Art and
Design and Trinity College Dublin. She worked in advertising and was head of
the art department in the King's Hospital for a number of years. She works in
a variety of mediums including watercolour, painting, and sculpture. She is
also a print-maker. Her botanical watercolours have been reproduced on china and
fabrics for Sybil Connolly. Other work has been reproduced on a series of
table mats depicting Georgian doors of Dublin.
Awards include first
prize in fabric printing at the RDS and residency in the Tyrone Guthrie
Centre, Annaghmakerrig.
Among other places her work has been exhibited
in the RHA, Oireachteas, Jorgensen Fine Art, Birr Castle, Alliance Francaise,
Kilcock Art Gallery, Farmleigh (GSD 50TH Anniversary exhibition), VUE (The
National Contemporary Art Fair) and the Graphic Studio Gallery. Her work was
also selected for 'Drawing Eire in China'.
She was an invited artist
for "Bog 50 x 70" celebrating the 10th anniversary of Leinster Printmakers.
Symes is a Member of the Graphic Studio Dublin and also a former board
member. She is also Council member of the Contemporary Irish Art
Society.
The
exhibition will run from 20 February – 22 March 2013.
To view some of the
paintings that will feature in the show and to read more about the
artist: