WILD ATLANTIC WINTER EXHIBITION: GREENLANE GALLERY | Dingle, Co Kerry
Exhibiting Artists: Gerard Byrne, Michael Flaherty, David Lee
In 2021, Byrne took a boat tour around the Dingle peninsula, photographing the cliffs that jutted out from the Atlantic. I’d like to paint these someday, he recalls telling his wife Agata. The images sat buried in his camera roll until very recently when he was asked by Greenlane Gallery to produce work for their Wild Atlantic Winter exhibition.
He began with the photographs from his trip, but like most of his work, he leaned into inventiveness, playfully rendering the cliffs with thick sweeps of a palette knife. He rarely works with this technique, but he fell into the wild physicality of the process and how it seemed to encapsulate the ruggedness of the coast. Byrne’s rock formations resemble jenga towers, built up of geometric shards, flicked with orange and green mosses and lichen. The water is still, scraped, subtly reflecting the protruding cliffs.
Byrne holds the very Irish sentiment that he could never be landlocked for long. The sea is his lifeblood, and the Dingle Bay Cliffs series – CALM, TRANQUILITY, SERENITY, QUIETUDE, MYSTERIOUS, STILLNESS – is a love song to that sentiment.
