Like many of Dorothy Cross’ sculptures, Family (2005) and Right Ball and Left Ball (2007) sees the artist work with found objects, transforming them with characteristic wit and sophistication. 

Right Ball and Left Ball (2007) presents a pair of deflated footballs, no longer of use, their past buoyancy now anchored in bronze. Emerging from each is a cast of the artist’s hands, index finger extended upwards in a pointed gesture suggesting optimism or aspiration.

In Family (2005) we see the artist’s undeniable craft and humour come together. Three spider crabs were found, dead for some time but still together. The intricacies of their form and the oddness of their sideways manoeuvres forever cast in bronze. The ‘father’ adorned with an improbable appendage also pointing upwards and away.

Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art film and photography. At once highly seductive and visually disorientating, Doherty’s artworks tend to begin as responses to specific terrains (most often mysterious isolated settings; places, we suspect, with a troubled past) and evolve as complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on what stories might be told about their hidden histories.

'For almost four decades, the art of Willie Doherty has been profoundly affected by border landscapes, border atmospheres, border experiences — in Ireland and beyond. Again and again, Doherty has haunted such spaces, wandering along country roads or lingering at suburban margins, exploring locations where, visibly or invisibly, one state connects with  another. (Or, put differently: the points where one state is separated from another.) He has been compelled to visit and revisit peripheral zones, condemned to reckon repeatedly with their fraught histories and disrupted geographies.' - Declan Long 'Where are we now?' from Willie Doherty, Where/Dove published to accompany the artist's 2021 exhibition at Fondazione Modena, Milan and Ulster Museum, Belfast.

"Eye Rolling All The Way Down was made during the initial months of the pandemic in 2020. I had been focusing on generic representations of the human body, wanting to create a false ‘universal’ form that I could manipulate and underline as strange. This work began with that same logic, but uses a depiction of movement to spread the body out over space. Its motion is recognisable vis a vis image - rather than bodily experience - using the elasticity of a cartoon, or the distortion you'd see in a glitching video to lose the boundaries of the form." - Hannah Fitz

Fitz’s sculptures are carefully constructed, rejecting sleekness for a finish that is deliberately crude, scrappy and uncertain, articulated by curling lines and uncertain wobbles. Despite this ‘handled’ quality, they present a uniform, reductive version of their subjects. Fitz’s figures are featureless everymen, unidentifiable aside from their actions.

As Gorman’s understanding and mastery of colour has deepened, he has begun to use it not only as a harmonic device, but as an active and animating element in his paintings: flat blocks of colour step to an offbeat rhythm, laid down in a jazz cool palette. Giving a nod to the gestural, expressionist works with which Gorman began his career in the 1980s, this new body of work takes on a more liberated, looser and freer painterly approach, all while demonstrating the intuitive balancing of colour, form and line that his work is prized for.

'This has echoes with the way fiction can be written. You begin with a very precise scene, or set of memories, and slowly, in the act of writing, you begin to scrape them away, until their very opposite may emerge. Or what comes is merely the emotion and nothing of the precise configurations with which you began. The few stray details which you leave in may seem casual to the reader, but they can have immense energy and power for the writer; they have been the route towards everything else.'  - Colm Toíbín on Richard Gorman

Since she began exhibiting in the late-1980s, Elizabeth Magill has developed a highly idiosyncratic approach to painting and printmaking. She is celebrated for her evocative landscapes, which capture atmospheric conditions with great sensitivity: the luminosity of daybreak, or the cool glow of moonlight. The scenes appear to be sited on the edge of urbanity – roofs, street-lamps or telephone wires can occasionally be sighted in the background, but human figures are rare. Instead, clusters of trees dominate Magill’s compositional arrangements, and only through their branches can hedges, hills and radiant skies be glimpsed.

"In California last year, Lisa woke up one morning and the sky was all orange. She lives in an area surrounded by trees that were burning by wildfires. Devastating as these events are, they can display an incredible visual beauty. Many of the tree imagery in these recent paintings were photographed in this part of USA in 2019. Scenes resonate differently when events happen somewhere you may have been." -  Elizabeth Magill

In his new series, 'Arizona' Brian Maguire continues his critique of contemporary capitalism, painting images based on events at the southern border of the USA. Some five years ago Maguire began to research the annual fatalities of Central American migrants in the deserts around Tucson, Arizona. The numbers of those who have died are frightening, the recent annual average is 145 deaths. In September 2019 Maguire made contact with the Chief Medical Officer of Pima County who allowed access to the images of the dead which were originally created by law enforcement. From 500 cases Maguire selected 90 as an archive from which to create these paintings. The dead remain anonymous to protect the families privacy.

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. Maguire’s most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. 

The extravagantly, even preposterously titled 'Stelliferous to degenerate' refers to a time in the extremely far future when the universe will no longer produce stars.  Using familiar materials (paint or colouring pencil) Nolan’s work consistently picks away at the coherence of our human perspective as applied to the wildness and strangeness of nature. Rendering cosmic forms at a wholly domestic human scale, the artist similarly makes the cosmic into something relatively cosy.

Amongst Isabel Nolan’s new paintings and drawings are a number of erupting, colourful landscapes; scenes of colliding, looped forms and forces, a world or worlds simultaneously coalescing and disintegrating.  They depict disorder and collapse into something beautiful but not cogent or explicable.  Nolan has described the impetus to make these works as a paradoxical desire to imagine how the future might look when humans are not present to witness it.

Currently on show

We are delighted to present Lawrence Weiner’s first solo show at Kerlin Gallery and his first solo show in Ireland in 28 years. The exhibition is comprised of three sculptures and three works on paper. The sculptures in text, ‘HELD JUST ABOVE THE CURRENT’, ‘IN LINE WITH SOMETHING ELSE’ and ‘PUT WITH THE OTHER THINGS’ are presented in Irish and English.