Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin, Ireland - Contemporary Art Gallery & Studios

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Gallery Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 11am - 6pm
Thursday: 11am - 7pm

Office Opening Hours:
Monday - Friday 10:00 - 6:00

Temple Bar Gallery & Studios
5 - 9 Temple Bar
Dublin 2
Phone +353 (0)1 671 0073
Fax +353 (0)1 677 7527
Email

Temple Bar Gallery & Studios is grant aided by An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council

Niamh O’Malley
a situation, a situation, and a story

Preview: Tuesday 26th February, 2008, 6-8pm
Exhibition continues until April 4th 2008

Artists talk: Wednesday 27th February 2008, 2pm in the gallery

A conversation with Brian Dillon: Friday 4th April, 2008, 5pm in the gallery, Booking essential.

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios is pleased to present a situation, a situation, and a story, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Niamh O’Malley. At Temple Bar Gallery, O’Malley presents three new works which expand her enquiry into the fabricated nature of the viewing experience. Her works often consist of highly seductive and richly coloured surfaces which collapse on close viewing into simple constructions; a slide or a video, projected onto the surface of a painting. O’Malley is interested in the distance from a source image to a spectacle and the deliberate manufacture and inherent disappointment of illusions.

For this exhibition, the screens are solid objects functioning as temporary containers for shifting, transient projections. Parts of the surfaces are painted in attempt to alter, intensify and still the source imagery. The projections and the paintings dissolve into each other, creating new and unreal images by the simple and formal layering of one medium over another. Through this methodology, O’Malley investigates the limitations of framing and the scope of the paintings to act as barriers, gaps, screens and illuminators. For the viewer the device acts as a prompt to fill in and ‘complete’ when presented with a blank expanse; what is lost or voided is replaced by what can be implied or imagined

Whether real, found or constructed O’Malley uses subject as an aide to method, with the final effect providing a dislocation or disruption of our way of seeing. All of the works are looped in an ‘eternal return’; a continual reveal and conceal which both captivates and disappoints, perhaps distancing us enough from the origin to make its deepest impact re-imaginable. Collectively this body of work aims to generate the potential for an incursion of unreality into a real world alongside (perhaps) a vague sense of disenchantment in the nature of image as chimera.

Niamh O’Malley is currently a resident artist at Firestation Artists Studios, Dublin, and is the 2008 recipient of the TBG&S/HIAP International Exchange Award. She was awarded the International Studio Programme Residency at PS1, MoMa, 2003/04 and the Northern Irish Fellowship at The British School at Rome, 2000. Recent exhibitions include Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Galerie Baumet Sultana, Paris, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, PS1, MoMa, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Hugh Lane, Dublin City Gallery and the Arts Council of Ireland. She will be having a solo exhibition as part of VOLTA NY's curated project ‘The Eye of the Beholder’ March 27-31, 2008.Thanks to Toby Dennett, Robin Watkins & Martin at Monte-Cristo Antiques Gallery, Powerscourt Townhouse

Press Contact: Rayne Booth - Temple Bar Gallery & Studios - t. + 353 1 671 0073 - e. press@templebargallery.com