Gerard Byrne Libri

100 Irish Artists, 100 Colour Plates. 6 Commentaries from respected writers such as: Mebh Ruane, Colin Graham, Valerie Connor, Fiona Kearney, Brian Hand and Noel Kelly - Creative Ireland: The Visual Arts will fast become the most desirable visual arts book this season. Creative Ireland: The Visual Arts presents an attractive record of the early 21st century contemporary visual arts in Ireland with 100 artists who have been selected for their specific contribution to the contemporary arts in the first years of the 21st Century. Aimed at a general audience, as well as the art connoisseur and enthusiast, each artist is profiled with an iconic example of their practice shown in full colour. The texts are engaging as they explain Ireland within the context of the early 21st century, and the impact that this has had socially, economically and culturally. The book is in an attractive format, and is priced at a level that makes it affordable.

Irish artist Gerard Byrne (1969) focuses on the way photography and film have influenced visual culture in the twentieth century. Byrne's conceptually-based photos and videos explore the genealogies underlying each picture, the different frames which guide its perception, as well as the references in which a mediated image evolves. Demonstrating a wide-ranging engagement with quotation and citation, the work seizes upon mass-media forms that were never intended to serve as ''models,'' but now have become such. ----------- George Baker has written a theoretical essay where he links Byrne's work to theater and notes that the presence of avant-garde dramatist Bertolt Brecht has never been less discussed, but more widely explored, than in the last decade of artistic practice. The author traces ''a set of provisional conjectures about the 'underground connection' of ... contemporary art to the present forms of capitalist crisis. They are new forms on both sides--the crises and transformatio