"Around me the images of thirty years.

"Around me the images of thirty years." In his metrical composition "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," WB Yeats contemplateed with a mixture of pride and miracle a collection of images that charted the course of the first three tumultuous decades of twentieth-century Irish history. The geographical division Yeats chose to reflect in succession was "an Ireland the bards have imagined, terrible and gay." As the twenty-first hundred dawns, Dublin's Municipal Gallery has temporarily consigned a sizable chunk of its permanent collection to the storerooms in order to appropriate an unusually generous amount of exhibition space to an extensive take a view of of the work of Brian Maguire. "Inside/Out" is made up almost entirely of work from the '90 in a variety of media and characterized from top to toe by Maguire's fierce but humane engagement with national politics and his unremitting trouble with the mechanics of social injustice and exclusion, the two at home and abroad. The terror persists in Maguire's images of Ireland and elsewhere, further the world they depict is more prosa ic than poetic, more grim than gay.

Maguire came to prominence in Ireland in the early '80 as the greatest in quantity obviously politicized member of a liberate group of neo-expressionist painters whose work paralleled similar motions elsewhere. His typical subject matter at the time included the dark mysteries of male heterosexual alienation and desire, the ongoing horrors of the Northern Irish conflict, and the everyday agonies of incarceration and institutionalization. (Maguire has for many years worked as a visiting artist within the Irish prison system) The enduring nature of these businesss is clearly registered in the selection of more newly come paintings chosen for inclusion in "Inside/Out." Other works included in the display refer to the abortion debates that have periodically riven Ireland from one side of to the other the past two decades and to vexed questions of mental-health care within the public health connected view The impact of time the artist exhausted traveling and living in the US during the '90 is also registered, especially in a series of mordant ruminations onward American gun cultur e.

The in the greatest degree notable augmentation of Maguire's practice in new years has been his adoption of video and photography. These derive from his practice of making small paintings of prison inmates and subsequently presenting the sitters with their portraits. When it came to presenting these works publicly, Maguire chose to exhibit photographs soared on lightboxes (or, in a work not shown here, a videotape) showing the paintings in their subjects' dwellings while the people themselves remained in prison. He has repeated this proces in a intend involving outpatients in a hospital day expanse in Northern Ireland and, principally memorably, with the children from Favela Vila Prudente with whom he worked for four month during the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. The relative complexity of this proces of distancing from the original painting and its adjoining matter underscores the delicate negotiation of power compositions and politesse that such trading in pictorial intimacies invariably involves. Which is to say that this strategy has allowed Ma guire to continue faith with a tradition of expressionistic figuration equal as he resists naturalizing or eliding connection and convention--tendencies that have to such a degree often compromised the radical potential of that tradition.

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