David Crone
b. 1937 Belfast

Selected Solo Exhibitions

1965-68-73-80		Arts Council Gallery, Belfast
1979		Keys Gallery, Derry
1980-82		Caldwell Gallery, Dublin
1984-85		Arts Council Gallery, Dublin (mid-career retrospective touring exhibition 1975-83), Belfast, Dublin, Kilkenny
1986		Academia San Corlos, Mexico City
1986		Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
1987-89-91-93		Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
1990-93-95		Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
1990		Narrow Water Gallery, Warrenpoint, Ireland
1992		Ainscough Gallery, Liverpool
1993		Sligo Arts Festival, Sligo, Ireland
1995		Ormeau Bath Gallery (opening exhibition), Belfast
1995		Cologne Art Fair (Fenderesky Gallery)
1996-99		Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
1999		Retrospective Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast
2001		Sligo Art Gallery, Sligo
2002-04		Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
2005		John Martin Chelsea, London
		Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
		Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
2007		John Martin Gallery, London

Selected Group Exhibitions

1963-80		Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Dublin
1962-64		Open Painting Exhibition, Arts Council Gallery, Belfast
1970-71		Celtic Triangle Exhibition - Belfast, Dublin, Cardiff, Edinburgh
1977		Eight Northern Ireland Artists, Glasgow
		Delighted Eye (a sense of Ireland) London, Belfast, Glasgow
1981		Hibernian Inscape (11 Irish Artists) Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow
1982		Irish Drawings, Hull Fleming Gallery, Vermount, USA
1984-85		Works on Paper by Irish Artists, Mexico City and Zacatecas
1985-87		Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind, Some New Irish Art, Touring USA, Canada, Finland
1987		Critics Choice, selected by Sean McCrum, Limerick, Ireland
1989-90-91-94		Art Cologne (Fenderesky Gallery)
1989-90		Irish-German Exchange, Touring Ireland and West-Germany
1991		Parable Island, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool
1991-92		The Fifth Province, Some Contemporary Art from Ireland, touring Canada
1994		Art and Design Matters, Ulster Museum, Belfast
		Determined Material Foundations, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
1995		Trist-Ann Gallery (opening exhibition)
1996-98		Art Beyond Conflict, Touring United States, Ireland, Belgium and Norway
1998-99		When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth Century Ireland, Touring England and the United States
2001		Royal Ulster Academy, Ulster Museum, Belfast (invited artist)
2001-02-04		Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, Dublin (invited Artist)

Public Collections

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Arts Council of Ireland, The Arts Council of Great Britain,
Ulster Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Contemporary Arts Society, Dublin, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, Ulster University, RTE, Ulster Television, Queen's University


From the Catalogue Introduction by Aidan Dunne

'David Crone's paintings do not let our eyes settle into the contemplation of single, coherent images. Their surfaces blur and fragment into networks of interlocking, overlapping planes and forms, leading the gaze into a process of slow negotiation and discovery. Latch onto a recognisable detail - there are many - and you can be sure that it will give way, like an optical trap door, presenting you with another, unanticipated, view.

In Crone's hall of mirrors, we are often unsure whether we are indoors or out, or whether it is day or night. The shape of things is provisional and shifting, as though objects are always caught on the point of metamorphosis. It's hard to think of a painter more attuned to peripheral vision: there's always something just there at the edge to draw your attention. Yet even though we cannot quite categorise the images, the paintings still offer welcoming, habitable spaces, allowing us to roam at will and imagine freely. Given their perceptual uncertainties, they are very comfortable places to be.

Crone is a gifted and thoughtful painter, with a distrust of the obvious, a beautiful, sensitive touch and a highly distinctive colour sense. He is at home with a muted, harmonious palette of toned-down earthy colours, such as soft, mossy greens and ochres tinged with rust. And he likes lead greys that verge on black, creamy whites and iridescent bursts of more vivid colour: sharp blues and astringent yellows that seem to arrive from another tonal register entirely. His paintings have a patient, considered quality, built up as they are in incremental layers. Yet he never over-elaborates: jagged edges, raw marks, forms hinted at rather than spelled out are all allowed to be as they are. For the most part there is a speculative, almost hesitant quality to both his line and the soft-edged expanses of colour, as though he is saying: "It could be this way, but then..."

While the subject matter of this current work is entirely rural or domestic, Crone arrived at it from a largely urban background. Born in Belfast in 1937, the city provided his home and studio for over fifty years. When he was most fully engaged with painting urban life, Belfast was a divided, security conscious place, the target of a relentless bombing campaign and the site of terrible violence and sectarian strife. This extreme background coloured his schematic interpretation of the city as a location of observation and suspicion, of discrete, opposed realities and rigid demarcation. And this sense of a picture as being a conjunction of a number of disparate things, different views and different viewpoints, none final or authoritative, persists in everything he has done since.

The immediate catalyst for the paintings in this exhibition was his move to the rural setting of County Down in 1994. While the change meant relinquishing the pace of city life, in pictorial terms, there is no urban-rural divide. He is attentive to the patchwork, composite nature of the pastoral environment: the contrived garden set within the functional, agricultural landscape, adjacent fields with their strikingly different uses and characters and annual cycles, the hodgepodge cluster of dwellings that make up an entity called a village, not to mention the unconditional urge of plants to grow and colonise. All of which is shaped by historical layering and underlying geology. It's not at all the seamless whole that a first glance might suggest but a network of bits and pieces that somehow function in loose accord.

From being highly particular accounts of the way we find our way through a fragmented and disorientating external world, the paintings quickly became meditations on how, as conscious beings, we try to apprehend and make sense of reality. A painting, Crone seems to imply, is ideally a speculative domain, a space of possibility for painter and viewer alike, exemplifying the way we approach and accommodate the world in the onrush of our lives. The busy inter-layering of colour, space and form in paint counterpart a constant mental layering, of perception, experience and memory. The paintings are, in effect, working models of what it is to be in the world.'

Aidan Dunne
Art Critic, The Irish Times