Assembling fragments of shape and colour, McKenna’s early abstract paintings adopt a vivid multi-chromatic palette and a dreamlike elasticity. As the decade progresses, the artist begins to introduce the human figure to these scenarios, using spatial illusion to bend linear time and elicit intense psychological drama. Moving from abstraction to figuration with ease, he layers windows within windows, rooms within rooms; suspending the figure in abstract geometric prisms, or splicing it into composite parts. Seldom seen since they were first exhibited, the paintings in the sixties have a vitality and sense of discovery that reverberates across half a century – and are as captivating now as they were upon completion.

Influenced by the language of classicism and informed by the history of Italian art, Du Pasquier’s paintings splice together simplified still life compositions, architectural plans, industrial drawings, and playful fragments of text with boldly simplified blocks of colour. For Twice in Dublin, Du Pasquier also refers back to her own archive and accumulated experience—in particular, her time spent regularly visiting Ireland in the 2000s. Assembling elements of her work from that era alongside more recent imagery, the artist has produced a new body of work that “like everything in life, has roots and connections with previous times”.

Working primarily with sculpture and occasionally painting, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained yet laden with subtle references to the built environment using materials such as plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. 

Aleana Egan has exhibited at Sculpture Centre, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Landesmuseum Münster; The Drawing Room and Jerwood Space, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh; Leeds Art Gallery; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She has also participated in the Berlin Biennale. Most recently, she has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Void Gallery, Derry (2022); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021) and NICC Vitrine Brussels (2020).

‘Orkish Palisade NPC’ depicts a figure carrying a spear, a pair of scissors and two golden letters bound by a red rope cut from the bottom right corner of the composition. Their torso is a knot of twisted palisade security fencing; their face wears a grotesque orkish grin framed by a bright red beard and masked by the nose and eye sockets of another face.

Similarly, ‘Elden Knotweed NPC’ stands in the foreground, holding a leaf, a spear, a hunting horn and a snake. Their clothes are anachronistic - a hi-vis jacket and nike baseball cap are paired with a set of ornately forged greaves, leather sandals and a doublet. A pair of eyes seem to peer through from behind the torn surface of the paper, their position lined up perfectly with the face their hands have ripped open.

One of the most important figures in international contemporary art, Liam Gillick works across diverse forms, including sculpture and installation. A theorist, curator and educator as well as an artist, his wider body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects, all of which inform (and are informed by) his art practice. Gillick’s line of enquiry is into conditions of production, including how it continues to operate in a post-industrial landscape: questions of economy, labour and social organisation are ongoing preoccupations. He is perhaps best-known for producing sculptural objects – platforms, screens, models, benches, prototypes, signage, or structural supports made from sleek modular Plexiglas and aluminium forms in standardised colours from the RAL system. These seductive materials speak the language of renovation and development: originally refined by the military, they’ve been widely used in corporate interiors since the 1990s, a decade in which post-industrial societies saw a shift from the collective to the individualist and privatised. Drawing upon engineering and industrial design as well as the legacy of hard-edged minimalism, these abstract quasi-architectural forms offer a critique of neo-liberal or corporate aesthetics, automation and endless (re)development. Focusing on secondary or incomplete forms such as screens and platforms, Gillick pinpoints structures which have a potential to destabilise the power of architecture and the architecture of power, creating generative spaces for discussion or the development of ideas.

Generally small in scale, Merlin James's works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy. Works on canvas might be collaged with tufts of hair or sawdust, distressed, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted, while his frame paintings on gauzy, sheer material treat the structure of the picture frame and stretcher bar as an integral part of the work. Also an erudite and thoughtful critic, James has a deep engagement with the history of art and this knowledge shapes and informs his practice. His works refine and renew many of painting’s most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture.

Zhou Li creates paintings, sculptures, installations and public art using mixed media, including oil paint, washes of ink, charcoal and cotton cloth. Her lyrical abstract paintings capture her acute sensory observations of the world: lightness and shadow, solidity and dissolution, the sense of being. Building upon the history of European painting and the central tenets of traditional Chinese art, Zhou Li harnesses both traditions to develop a distinct painterly language. Her paintings looks towards nature as a starting point, particularly the mountainous terrains of Southern China, but are imbued with a sense of much more: every brush stroke on the canvas is driven by her persistent query and pursuit of being.