Factory Made
23 May - 28 June 2025
Kirstin Arndt
Sofia Hultén
Fergus Martin
Hazel O’Sullivan
Hazel O’Sullivan l. to r.: Untitled 2025 Pencil and pen drawing on gridded paper 73 x 53 cm, Lagore Crannóg 2025 Acrylic on canvas 250 x 300 cm, Untitled 2025 Pencil and pen drawing on gridded paper 73 x 53 cm
l. to r.: Kirstin Arndt, Fergus Martin, and Sofia Hultén in Factory Made.
Factory Made at Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, looks at a common interest in a number of contemporary art practices that celebrate the use of industrial materials and tools, as much as possible in their existing states, with the minimum of intervention, to a variety of artistic ends, starting with German artist Kirstin Arndt.
It echoes a theme in the recently-visited Room 1 in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, called Aus Der Fabrik / From the Factory which celebrates the work of two leading 20th century artists Donald Judd and Charlotte Posenenske. The wall text explains how the early minimalists were “ fascinated by serially manufactured products from factories “ and “ After making his first boxes by hand, Judd commissioned the family business Bernstein Brothers to produce his work industrially.“ Posenenske, on the other hand “ .. deliberately departs from this sobriety “ with her playful square tube configurations made using unadorned metal industrial vents or plain brown corrugated cardboard. The Posenenske sculptures in the room are reconstructed several times during the exhibition, according to the wall text.
Add to the industrial aesthetic in Arndt a play with material-specificity and site-specificity as the materials fall or suspend in space, sometimes map space, always allowing the materials to speak eloquently. The materials variously absorb light, reflect light, make light, depending on their factory-made material or finish. Her floating compositions are all the more impactful thanks to their stripped-down nature and clean, simple forms.
Sofia Hultén’s work has been described as aggressively or brutally industrial. Her industrially sourced or found works bear the marks of use, of wear-and-tear, of being in the world, of having worked in or been broken in the world. Hultén engages with her materials in a more personal and direct way using the memory of the material and of the artist as active components. She takes her materials on a journey which can be playful, violent or loving.
Fergus Martin's new paintings develop an aspect of his most recent solo exhibiton in Green On Red Gallery with the invention of new shaped, factory-produced " canvases ". They are wall-mounted and/or floor-mounted. These new Atomic ( 2025 ) paintings on aluminium are meticulously painted by hand in one burnt umber colour , front and sides, with a small 1" wide paint brush. They have an insistent, luxuriant presence.
We are excited to show London-based Irish artist Hazel O'Sullivan for the second time in Green On Red Gallery with a new large painting, Lagore Crannóg ( 2025 ) and new drawings. The large hard-edge abstract painting somehow hovers between early Renaissance perspectival interiors - also the root of her previous wood-inlay and carpet-inlay paintings - and a disarmingly large staring face.
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Back outside the square Mies van der Rohe steel-and-glass, single-storey Neue Nationalgalerie, Richard Serra’s factory-pounded cube Berlin Block ( For Charlie Chaplin ) ( 1978 ) tilts to one side, playing with the earth’s surface and the building’s stability while paying homage to cinema's most famous tramp.
Kirstin Ardnt Untitled 2025 Powder-coated aluminum 120 x 60 x 5 cm
Kirstin Arndt Untitled 2024 Powder-coated aluminum 303 x 496 x1 cm
The work of Sofia Hultén is driven by an experimental questioning of the things we encounter in everyday life. Hultén's raw objects usually come to her second-hand,sourced online or found on the street. They bear marks of a previous life, suggesting hidden potentials and parallel possibilities in their compositional re-arrangements. Her materials often appear as fragments of a larger frame of activity, similar to a chapter in a longer storyline. Many of her works are brain-teasing, sometimes humorous demonstrations of the ways in which art, often more so than philosophy or science, can mediate between abstract reasoning and aesthetic experience.
Many works featured in the show are based on the artist’s experiences in the past few years rebuilding a family house that had been burned to the ground, a process that led to dealings with crooked builders, flooding cellars and and a still unresolved trial. Various objects familiar from construction sites – digging teeth from large excavators, clay drainage pipes and traps, portable plastic toilets – are all re-arranged or altered to gain new meanings. Groups of various polished, reflective digging teeth presented on the gallery walls appear like the blood sucking incisors of vampires, while clay pipes and traps placed on the floor become outsized phallic artificial limbs.
Sofia Hultén Super Call Me Fragole Ego #6 Ceramic mud gully, glass 64 x 70 x 24 cm
Sofia Hulten Super Call Me Fragile Ego #5 2021 Ceramic mud gully, glass 68 x 45 x 30 cm
ADD FERGUS MARTIN DIPTYCH
Come see Factory Made at Green On Red Gallery, from May 23 to June 28 2025. You can find us at Park Lane, Spencer Dock, North Wall, Dublin 1.