Inside National Gallery of Ireland: William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy, Inspirations and Admirers.
Nowadays, calling an artist before their time is loosely thrown around at the near scent of modern ideologies or imagery in any artwork from before the 2000s. However, there is no one who deserves that title more than William Blake. Blake, a poet, painter and printmaker, built a visionary world populated by titanic figures, fallen angels, and forces of creation and destruction locked in eternal conflict. It's hard to believe it came from a mind from 200 years ago.
Blake's work examines the battling concepts of heaven and hell, creation and destruction, and reason and imagination through his own idiosyncratic visual language. Thanks to Blake's thought-provoking artwork, we have modern art as he inspired greats across disciplines, such as musicians like Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and U2. He also inspired filmmaker Martin Scorsese writers such as J.G. Ballard and Allen Ginsberg. Now Blake's work has taken a trip to the home city of U2, Dublin. William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy in the National Gallery of Ireland is a collaboration exhibition with the Tate, which places Blake among the artists he inspired and admired, creating a conversation across centuries. Among them, designer Una Burke created a three-piece collaboration with the exhibit available in the National Gallery of Ireland gift shop.
The NAI/Tate collaboration exhibition doesn’t hold back, it opens with bright colourful pieces that immediately submerge you in Blake’s style before introducing you to over 100 pieces from artists such as Turner, Fuseli, Barry, Mortimer and Rowlandson alongside Blake himself. The collaborative exhibition positions an entire era of creative chaos in one room. These were artists responding to revolution, to upheaval, to a world being turned inside out, to internal struggles and worldly problems, yet a string of imagination and surreal fantasy binds them all together.
If you've been feeling creatively stuck or like everything's already been done, this exhibition is certain to inspire. Proof, if you needed it, that the most extraordinary work tends to come from exactly the kind of uncertainty we're all navigating now. What's quietly striking about it is how little has actually changed. The questions these works are asking about power, imagination, freedom, and what it means to make something real are the same ones we're still fumbling through now.
If you’re in need of an artistic refresh or simply looking to explore Blake’s impact on an area of European artwork, you can view the exhibition in NAI until July 19th. There is free entry to the exhibition on Wednesday mornings until 11:30 am, otherwise tickets range from 0 to 16 euros and can be purchased via the National Gallery of Ireland. For more information on the exhibition, visit the National Gallery of Ireland website: https://www.nationalgallery.ie/
Written by: Shaunamay Martin Bohan
Edited By: Kirsten Baldwin
