Ways of Seeing: Gerard Byrne Gallery | 13 Trinity St, Dublin 2
“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
― John Berger
The light in Dublin changes hourly. Gerard Byrne has always been inspired by its evolution. Through this act of observing, he learnt something essential: what you see depends entirely on how you look.
Ways of Seeing gathers the subjects Byrne returns to with his set of oils and a keen eye. The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of emotional shifts. Swimmers on a rare sunny afternoon at Seapoint sit beside the solitary rooftops of a quiet Irish village. The contrast is deliberate. You move from one state of being to another, adjusting your gaze as you go.
John Berger wrote that seeing comes before words, that we see the world before we learn to speak it. Byrne's paintings operate in that pre-verbal space. His industrial works; British cranes, warehouses, the working architecture of Dublin's docklands, are structures painted by someone who once kept lighthouses lit along the Irish coast. The beauty here is earned, the kind that comes from knowing how things actually work.
From there, Byrne’s brush softens over the Botanic Gardens: light spilling through leaves and the geometry of their stems, observed with an artist’s attention. His figures emerge intermittently, shaped by nights in Celtic Tiger–era jazz bars — bodies leaning toward one another, the charge of proximity, the tension between connection and disconnection. 
In the studio, Byrne’s large-scale still lifes are rendered with the same expressive touch he brings to the streets. Sunlit vessels and everyday objects are lifted by light and colour, their shadows and surfaces revealing the pulse of simple things brought vividly to life. Then the city opens out again. Painted on location — Pen Corner, the Grand Canal, Georgian doorways — Byrne’s plein-air works document the elements of city character that are vanishing even as his paint dries.
Ways of Seeing is what remains after nearly four decades of looking: machines and gardens, bodies and streets, glass catching the afternoon light. These are paintings that insist you slow down, that resist consumption, that demand you look closely. In an age of scrolling and skimming, Byrne offers sustained attention as a radical act.
