Gerard Byrne
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present The Struggle With the Angel, a new exhibition by Gerard Byrne.
The Struggle With the Angel presents a series of black and white photographs taken using a Mamiya 7, a highly portable medium-format camera with a cult status among artists. Purchased from a fellow artist in 2008, Byrne brought the camera with him on his travels for a period of 15 years, a span encompassing his participation in international exhibitions like Skulptur Projekte, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. The artist has captured transient moments on the periphery of these events, as well as more intimate and reflective encounters – visiting parks and beaches, or relaxing with friends and family. The resulting body of work, developed by hand by Byrne in a darkroom built to produce the project, is a meditation on the world the camera conjures, its promises, disappointments, and surprises.
selected works
about the artist
Gerard Byrne
b. 1969, Dublin. Lives and works in Dublin
Working primarily with lens-based media, Gerard Byrne explores the paradoxical relationship between time and image. Looking at both highbrow and popular media, from the art press to men’s magazines, museum displays to commercial radio stations, Byrne meticulously documents and reconstructs the cultural ephemera of the last century. With deadpan humour, his works draw attention to the ways in which text, sound and image produce and transmit meaning, and how shifting contexts render this meaning impermanent. In particular his works have looked at the legacy of Modernism, evolving attitudes towards sexuality, and the move from collective sources of entertainment to the more fragmented media culture of the 21st Century. Never succumbing to nostalgia, Byrne’s analysis of the recent past and its mythologies tells us just as much about the present – how, far from being inevitable, the moment we live in is just one of a number of possible outcomes, and how alternative futures can live on through cultural artefacts.
Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli (Film inside an image), 2024
Towner Eastbourne, UK
Byrne has had solo exhibitions in many of the world’s leading museums, including Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland; Secession, Vienna; Graz Museum, Austria; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Serlachius Museum Gosta, Finland; Centraal Museum Utrecht; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Hyde Gallery, both Dublin; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon and ACCA, Melbourne. He has participated in major international exhibitions including Skulptur Projekte, Documenta, Performa, the Tate Triennial, FRONT International Cleveland Triennial, the 52nd and 54th Venice biennales, and the Busan, Gwangju, Sydney, Auckland, Lyon and Istanbul biennales.