Margaret Corcoran’s new series, 'The New Life – La Vita Nuova', emerges from a three-year period of working with and through the Etruscan bronzes of San Casciano dei Bagni, excavated in 2022; Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy; and the geopolitical turmoil and gross injustices currently uprooting and devastating peoples all around the world.
Feeling called to witness the ‘vita nuova’ of the present moment, Corcoran reaches out a hand from the here and now, drawing the ancient past across the divide to us and bringing first-century Tuscany and twenty-first century Ireland into conversation. With her characteristic restraint, tactility, and lightness coupled with ‘expanses of saturated colour or flurries of calligraphic brushwork’ (Aidan Dunne, Irish Times), Corcoran’s work makes an unforgettable link between the discoveries made at the site of San Casciano, a temple where warring Romans and Etruscans came together to worship, and the pressing need for peaceful coexistence today. Working across multiple media, 'The New Life – La Vita Nuova' oscillates between painstaking detail and dreamlike fluidity. The works are populated with interpellations of the unearthed statues and figures drawn from Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise, set against backdrops that span the familiar grounds of the Powerscourt Estate to the Grand Canyon – with the poignant addition of Palestinian olive trees. Corcoran’s Portrait of Marian Keyes (2024) was recently selected by Director Caroline Campbell as one of her favourite pieces in the NGI collection. 'The New Life – La Vita Nuova' takes the rich colouration, intricate beauty, and art historical references of Corcoran’s portraiture and reframes it for a besieged world. Calling up feminist narratives and imaginaries, Corcoran employs figures such as Demeter, Beatrice, and a universal Mother to beseech us: ‘Please, can we save the Earth?’
Accompanying Text by Chiara Harrison Lambe
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Chiara Harrison Lambe is an art historian, writer, and artist based in Berlin. Supported by the Elsa Neumann Scholarship, she is presently completing her doctoral studies in Art and Visual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, with a focus on twentieth-century Irish modernism. Chiara is the inaugural winner of the National Gallery of Ireland’s Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Roll Magazine, Kill Screen, the Literary Field Kaleidoscope, the Irish Arts Review, and
Feminist Modernist Studies.
