I have just got back from a trip to Dublin. There has been a lot of talk about the city’s fall from economic grace – indeed it certainly felt different to my last visit, three years ago, at the pinnacle of the upswing. However, despite the prevalence of plywood nailed over shop-fronts around the city centre and seemingly halted construction projects, the city’s galleries were open for business.

My first stop was to Mark Garry’s show ‘another place’ at Kerlin – his first with the gallery. He claims to have been planning this exhibition at the notoriously long, thin space for a couple of years now, and two of the pieces in the show – a half-spectrum of coloured threads bouncing from side to side of the gallery, and a string of beads that rose from a spiral on the floor to the high ceiling – made dramatic use of its dimensions. Garry seems to stretch formal concerns of material transformation and craftsmanship to devotional, even religious, extremes.

Almost next-door, Douglas Hyde Gallery was showing a selection of paintings by the young Dublin-based painter Ciaran Murphy. Although they seemed to subscribe to a familiar and fashionable style – modest-sized oil paintings in washed-out colours taken from an eclectic range of photographic sources – they are, nevertheless, at their best both endearing and unnerving. Animals, such as a herd of woolly mammoths, seem impossibly melancholy, while snatches of landscape are remote and elegiac.

Oddly, Green on Red Gallery, across town, are showing paintings by Damian Flood – a painter also of the post-Tuymans school, whose work was occasionally indistinguishable from Murphy’s. He differentiated himself by more abstract and formal experimentation – sometimes painting directly onto small photographs – but shared an interest in landscape. It’s hard to choose between them, but somehow Murphy’s show had an edge of strangeness lacking here.

At Pallas Contemporary Projects there was a concise and sharp show by two Australian artists, Pat Foster and Jen Berean, titled ‘The Problem with Stability’. Employing an icy cool, hipster aesthetic, a crowd control barrier embracing a sheet of glass and grubby prints made from enlarged photographs of white wall paint were nevertheless thoughtful meditations on contemporary forms of physical control and coercion in the city.

At the relatively new gallery Oonagh Young Gallery was a show called ‘Blasphemy’, taking its cue from a new law punishable by a €25,000 fine for anyone who “publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.” The gallery contained plenty that might be deemed blasphemous; ironically, for the sake of their bank balances, we might hope that their protest goes unheard by the authorities.