Isabel Nolan's 'Calling on Gravity' at The Douglas Hyde Gallery

Isabel Nolan's exhibition 'Calling on Gravity' ran from 28 July to 30 September at The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, featuring 47 works from 2012 to 2017. The show included sculptures, drawings, paintings, photographs, and rugs, arranged to challenge institutional hierarchies by subverting traditional museum displays. Notable pieces included the oil painting 'Tony Soprano at the Kunsthistorisches Museum' (2017), depicting the fictional mobster in a contemplative pose against a lemon-yellow rendition of the Vienna museum's dome. Other works featured figures like Giordano Bruno, Simone Weil, and Paul Thek, each set against contradictory modernist abstraction. Sculptures resembling chandeliers were placed on the floor or tipped over, sometimes draped with cloths that blocked light, while photographs hung low showed saints' feet or mundane scenes like pigeons on pavement. Installations such as 'What kind of dust is it?' (2017) and 'Doryphoros in Glory' (2016) offered miniature upendings, with the latter focusing irreverently on a Greek sculpture's posterior. The geometric floor sculpture 'Narcissus' pool (for SMcK)' (2017) evoked rippling water through nested shapes, referencing the late artist Stephen McKenna. Nolan's assembly created a minimuseum that resisted logical navigation, emphasizing suspension and drift over instruction, ultimately symbolically undoing authority and class structures through contradictory associations and medium-specificity.