Galway University Hospital examines the contemporary 'subject' with a multifaceted exhibition of artwork by artists Allyson Keehan, Ciaran O'Sullivan, Clare Henderson, Emmet Kierans, Jennifer Cunningham, Joe McNicholas, Louise Neiland, Mike Delohery and Nicole Tilly.

As part of the Arts Festival 'Subjected' brings together artists whose work is linked by their contemporary interrogation of the still life and portraiture traditions. The exhibition maps the increasingly complex intersections between the artist, subject and the object, the seen and unseen, the beautiful and the uncanny. This mapping is carried by artists who though leaning heavily on art practices considered traditional, have determinedly departed from the traditional context.

Executed with a seductive accessible realism, these works are at once both familiar and alien. These artists are resisting the tide of new media whilst carving out a new realism, one that is prying at the personal poetic rather than preaching the political. The unremarkable objects and interrupted people examined within the works become less subjects to observe and more points of entry to very real and quite often universal truths.

This is the first time that these works have been shown in Galway and the exhibition provides Galway audiences an opportunity to view some of the best up and coming contemporary Irish artists.

The positioning of this exhibition, which converses through chosen subjects about a life in flux, in the hospital, makes sense. It is fitting that the truths the artists are trying to communicate find their voice within a context that is truly universal, a democratic stage. The beauty of the work enlivens the stagnant structures and injects a frenetic energy into these quiet plains.

The ephemeral nature of the situations experienced by the hospital populous means that this exhibition will find, in them, not only an audience transfixed by the beauty of the objects, but one who is already aware of the sub surfaces.

This type of audience will engage more readily with the work as gateways to exploring their own meanings. The traditional white cube is too severed to allow this exhibition and its viewers to explore the incongruity and tension between the seen and the felt, between the observed and the one observing, between the subject and those who have chosen it.

Subjected will be situated on the main corridor of Block 2C and in the Foyer of University College Hospital Galway. The exhibition will be on display until 29 August.

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