Helen A Pritchard review: Rich work that is lively, engaging and invigorating

The Horse, an unassuming gallery tucked down a side street near the Rotunda in Dublin, is marking its fifth birthday with a solo show by the London-based artist Helena A Pritchard.

A rough-and-ready white cube, minimally interrupted by a bright-yellow staircase, the exhibition space has an improvisatory feel ideal for the scale and tone of Pritchard’s work.

Spanning sculpture, assemblage and painting, the works on show are varied and delightfully promiscuous in their use of materials.

A Painting About Something Smoking (2015) is a small canvas framed behind glass with what looks like an metal ashtray cover sitting in an abstracted colour field of burnished red and blue. The cigarette butt resting within gives it the appearance of a mouth, while a hole just above it distorts the resulting visage in the manner of a lo-fi cubist portrait.