At the end of the month we shall be saying goodbye to the imposing artwork that has made its home in the gallery atrium for many months. ‘Silent Frames’ (oil on linen, 2011) was created by our former artist in residence (summer 2011) Etienne Zack.

‘Silent Frames’ was painted on site, in the artists’ studio here in The Model. Zack loaned it to us for display until spring of this year. Now the work is making its way across the Atlantic to its next destination, Massachusetts, USA. It will form part of the display of Etienne’s work at Oh Canada, the largest survey of contemporary Canadian art ever produced outside Canada, mounted by MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).

Working away from Los Angeles, USA and Vancouver, Canada, where he is based, Zack finds inspiration in being absorbed in the unfamiliar: “That’s quite crucial to making paintings …You get immersed in a completely different environment that offers completely different things and you become formed by somewhere else.”

Zack donated his work ‘Light Matter’ (2011) to us, painted during his residency at The Model. It is his own surreal take on the nuanced changes in weather in the West of Ireland, thus continuing in an established tradition of Irish landscape painting. Zack says of this work –

“Light shining through parting clouds is an incident I saw repeatedly while being at The Model residency. Before arriving in Sligo, I had been thinking about doing a painting on the metaphor of light and parting clouds. It made greater sense to make it after seeing again and again this recurring event in Sligo.”

Etienne will be back for our ‘Up The Walls’ exhibition in the summer so watch this space!