The Douglas Hyde Gallery

Eric N. Mack, Scampolo!

4 March – 29 May 2022 

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present Eric N. Mack’s first solo exhibition in Ireland titled Scampolo! or remnant in Italian. Working onsite over the past few weeks, Mack has created an expansive new site-specific installation that tethers to the gallery’s architecture and presents a series of movements through abstraction, colour and image for viewers.

Pushing the boundaries of painting and object, of art and fashion, Eric N. Mack uses fabric, worn clothes, dye, blankets, paint, bleach, magazine cut-outs and photographs to create three-dimensional tactile assemblages in which colour, form, texture and line become both intimate and culturally significant.

Human scale is integral to the work’s relationship to any space. In Gallery 1 Scampolo! (2022) stretches from handrails to gallery walls calling the viewer into the physical space. Locally procured pieces of linen, produced by one of the last remaining linen makers in Ireland, (Emblem Weavers) are sewed together with polyesters and fabrics from elsewhere, creating a connection between the local and the universal. It is here that the Italian word for factory, fabric, comes to mind and textile’s longstanding relationships with production, and with the hand and body. While photographs taken from fashion catwalks, from a variety of magazines including The Face, and some produced through Mack’s ongoing collaboration with stylist Haley Wollens and designer Kiko Kostadinov, are enlarged and dispersed across the space connecting us with other spaces. 

Scampolo! is open to the public for Sculpture Dublin on Saturday 30th April. The exhibition is free to attend and the gallery is open 12 – 5pm. 

The exhibition continues until 29 May 2022. The gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm, and until 6pm on Thursday. 

The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Trinity College, Dublin 2

Website: https://thedouglashyde.ie