Niamh O'Malley 'Gather', La Biennale di Venezia 2022

23 April — 27 November 2022

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents Gather by Niamh O'Malley, the Irish representation at the he 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2022.

Niamh O’Malley’s sculpture and moving image works hold us in the space for which they are made. Using steel, limestone, wood, and glass, she shapes and assembles objects to create a purposeful landscape of forms. Sculptures tall and free-standing, ground-bearing and cantilevered, with paced and looped moving image, inhabit and animate.

This exhibition is a call to gather. It invites movement and communality. It is both lure and demand, for touch, encounter, and occupancy. It draws attention to its location towards the end of the length of the Arsenale; a place of thresholds, windows, glass, holes, drains, vents, and a glimmer of water and daylight. O’Malley’s sculptures gesture towards enabling, offering protection, conveying sensations of touch, and more – of grabbing, holding, caressing surfaces, offering a moment of tether and precarious poise.

Gather is curated by the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Curatorial Team, Clíodhna Shaffrey & Michael Hill.

This film was produced by Ros Kavanagh and documents the exhibition at the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Niamh O’Malley was born in Co. Mayo, Ireland, and lives and works in Dublin. She studied in Belfast where she was a Director at Catalyst Arts. O’Malley’s recent solo exhibitions include John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2021), mother’s tankstation Dublin (2020), Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2019), Lismore Castle Arts (2019), Grazer Kunstverein (2018), Bluecoat, Liverpool (2015), The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017 and 2015). Selected group exhibitions include Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival; CAG, Vancouver; eva International, Limerick; Eli & Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.