The Outsider
2006
Mixed media paintings created in a monastery. Curated by Finbar Kelly.
Installation
Essay
In 1381, the statue of the Madonna at Tir Briúin began miraculously to speak. The words transformed all the horrors lingering after a black death had killed thousands, especially people west of the Shannon. Other mirabile followed. A pig gave birth to a lamb and a woman who went to the well for water on…
Critical Reviews
Maybe it was just a matter of time until Cléa van der Grijn came around to making a series of paintings based on the iconography of the Madonna. She had, for example, a liking for gold leaf that chimed with a yearning for the transcendental, a desire to reach beyond the ordinary and the visible,…
When Chris Ofili exhibited his Holy Virgin Mary (a small part of which comprised elephant dung) at New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in 1999, so incensed was Mayor Giuliani at a work he deemed ‘sick, offensive and anti-Catholic’ that he threatened to evict the venerable institution from its city owned building. While Cléa…
