Galway Arts Festival showcases ‘quality popular art’

There’s a strong focus on ‘pop art’ at this year’s Galway Arts Festival, according to the event’s Festival Director Paul Fahy.

“Presenting quality art while not being afraid to be popular,” is how he describes the Festival’s approach.

The main gallery spaces this year will be located in the former Connacht Tribune Printing Works in Market Street and will house several major shows, including one from Belfast artist John Kindness and another from Scotland’s Eduardo Paolozzi. John Kindness continues his exploration of Homer’s Odyssey in Odysseus, an exhibition that incorporates painting, sculpting, and etching.

Kindness’s work and its themes are distinctly classical, but he uses unusual artefacts, such as toilet seats, as his canvas, explains Paul, adding that this exhibition will be the first major show in Ireland from Kindness since a retrospective in Belfast in 2006.

The Absolut Gallery in Market Street will also feature work from one of pop art’s pioneers, Eduardo Paolozzi, who died in 2005. This compulsive collector and jumbler of icons was highly regarded both as a sculptor and for his kaleidoscopic print projects, as will be seen in his show, General Dynamic F.U.N. A related exhibition at the Absolut Festival Gallery, entitled Pre-Pop to Post-Human, will bring together 15 young artists who have created specially commissioned prints in response to the ideas behind Eduardo Paolozzi’s famous 1952 BUNK portfolio.