The exhibition raises questions about the complex relationship between humanity and the environment, about the value ascribed to material possessions and about worthlessness, decay and renewal. Simple objects such as used tea bags, read newspapers, leather footballs, old fishing rope etc are generally deemed useless, but made use of – recycled, upcycled, transformed – in this exhibition. The artist is asking how our accelerated speed of life is affecting our surroundings and how nature reacts to our increasingly ‘man-made’ physical world.
The three main installation works – Her Loneliness Begins To Cry Out,The Road and At Night I Sleep, During The Day I Dream – are dreamlike, playful and semi-surreal responses to the theme of roadkill and plastic pollution. The other works are related off-springs. The sculpture You Can’t Get There From Here is made from approx 200 dolls cast in cement and looks at how we define female beauty, how we pass our perceived ideas/ideals onto the next generation. The painting Beachcomber is a self portrait of sorts, depicting a person in a landscape combing the beach for materials. The Blind Rush Of Time, a wall based sculpture made from paper logs, contains a cast with a dead black bird and plastic phone – nature and technology as uncomfortable bedfellows. Let Him Increase and Let Me Decrease, If I Had Your Grace I Would Burn My Own and Breathing My Father In are meditations on spirituality and redemption, expressions of love towards a higher being and contemplations on an invisible world. My Father Is Always At Work is playing with a material not normally associated with art production – old leather footballs are used to create an undefined perhaps cloud-like shape.
Thomas Brezing was born in Germany in 1969 and moved to Ireland in the 1990’s. He has had three solo exhibitions at The Molesworth Gallery, and has shown at museums and arts centres such as The Irish Museum of Modern Art (group), The Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Draiocht in Dublin, the LAB in Dublin, and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (all solo). He has also contributed to group exhibitions in Germany, Wales, England, Finland and Belgium. Brezing was nominated for the AIB Prize in 2003 and 2010. He has also been the recipient of numerous Arts Council Awards. His work is included in the collections of the Office of Public Works, the National Portrait Collection, Lapua Art Museum (Finland), Mayo County Council, Dundalk District Council, Drogheda Municipal Art Collection and the Boyle Civic Collection.
Published by Wall Street International, January 2015
