Press Release

Opening: Thursday, 2 July 2020, 18:00-21:00

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On 23 March 2020 Lovaas Projects initiated an “art virus” which has culminated in the COVID19 DIARIES exhibition. The first artist to be “infected,” Verena Issel, sent a work created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and in turn “infected" another artist and so on and so on.... Today over 100 artists from all over the world have “contaminated” us with their essential gift of artistic creation. Though the pandemic rages on in many parts of the world, the COVID19 DIARIES exhibition bears witness to the social, economic and psychological disruption we have all experienced. The themes elaborated in the exhibition range from solitude, loneness, disaster, the mundane, disconnectedness, and escapism.

 

The COVID19 DIARIES was inspired by a tradition of art-making during periods of crisis, including Goya’s “The Disasters of War” series that was created during the Peninsular War in the early 1800s. Or Picasso’s paintings that came out of Paris during World War II, as well as works made by the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon during the Nazis rise to power in Germany. “These eye-witness series feel so muchmore important to me than what was created in recollection years later,” Quinn says. “Ifeel it’s an artist’s job to bear witness to the time that we live in. It is an engagement with one of the most significant stories of our time.”

 

The Polish writer and 2019 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk wrote “The virus has reminded us of the thing we have been denying so passionately: that we are delicate creatures, composed of the most fragile material. That we die—that we are mortal. That we are not separated from the rest of the world by our ‘humanity,’ by any exceptionality, but that the world is instead a kind of great network in which we are enmeshed, connected with other beings by invisible threads of dependence and influence.”

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The COVID19 DIARIES exhibition exalts in the friendships and connectedness between artists. It is an affirmation of art and the power of imagination to guide us through confusing, scary, and absurd times. Ultimately this exhibition presents a raw, of-the- moment slice of our disrupted cultural pie.

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The art is priced between €50-€3000. All proceeds from the sale of art will go to the artists and the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

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Gallery Hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 14:00-18:00

Or by appointment: #01522 2679175