DOROTHY CROSS
b. 1956, Cork, Ireland
Lives and works in Connemara, Ireland

Working in sculpture, film and photography, Dorothy Cross examines the relationship between living beings and the natural world. Living in Connemara, a rural area on Ireland’s west coast, the artist sees nature, the ocean and the body as sites of constant change and flux. Her works harness this fluidity and generative power, staging unexpected encounters between plants, animals, body parts and everyday objects, resulting in strange, hybrid forms that range from the lyrical, sublime and meditative, to the erotic, humorous and playful. In two new sculptures presented at Frieze, a child’s hand captures a gold-plated scarab beetle (a potent symbol of rebirth, transformation and the afterlife since Ancient Egypt), and the shell of a sea snail plants itself onto a religious figurine (swallowing up and entering a strange symbiosis with the Virgin Mary). Full of pathos, vulnerability, and at times humour, these works demonstrate Cross’s ongoing engagement with the legacy of Surrealism and instinct for fostering a compelling dialogue between objects and creatures.

Dorothy Cross has exhibited in museums including MoMA PS1; ACCA, Melbourne; Tate, St Ives; ICA, Philadelphia; Modern Art Oxford; Turner Contemporary, Margate; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London. Cross is currently working on an ongoing project titled KINSHIP, a ritualised journey returning a mummified body from Ireland to Egypt, and resulting in a new publication published on 10 October with contributions from Edmund de Waal, Max Porter, Ahdaf Soueif and more. Current/forthcoming exhibitions include the Hayward Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: Art and Motherhood (various venues across the UK, 2024–2025) and Chatsworth House (2025). Cross has recently shown at Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2024); Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham UK; Cinili Hamam, Istanbul; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (all 2023); The Model, Sligo; Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas; girls, girls, girls, curated by Simone Rocha, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; PAC Milano; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (all 2022). Cross has participated in the Venice, Istanbul and Liverpool biennales.

JUSTIN FITZPATRICK
b. 1985, Dublin, Ireland
Lives and works in Montargis, France

Justin Fitzpatrick works with painting, sculpture, text and, most recently, video to explore human consciousness through the prism of biology. He presents us with elaborate and fantastical paintings of mysterious figures and mutating forms; sinewy lines evoke art nouveau detailing, fused with gothic and macabre elements. Much of his work contains figurative elements transformed into static, infrastructural ones: the bodies of men become mechanical, forming spaces to inhabit or transit upon. Highly stylised musculoskeletal structures seem visible through the skin, while ornate, vegetal forms and insects link his subjects to the earth, or point towards the interconnectedness of different species. Fitzpatrick’s work is informed by the science around cellular structures (in particular, mitochondria), metaphysical poetry, mythologies, and an array of archetypal figures, often viewed through a lens of class and sexuality.

Born in 1985 in Dublin, Ireland, Justin Fitzpatrick attended St. Oswald’s School of Painting in London from 2004–2007 and earned his MA in Fine Art Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2015. Current and forthcoming exhibitions include Arcanes, Rituels et Chimères, FRAC Corsica (4 July – 19 October) and A Musical Instrument, the artist's first solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery (24 October – 23 November). Recent solo exhibitions include Ballotta, La Ferme du Buisson, Paris (2024); Ballotta, Seventeen Gallery, London; Mitochondrial Abba, Margot Samel, New York (both 2023); Alpha Salad, The Tetley, Leeds; Angiosperme Telephone, Sultana Gallery, Paris (both 2022).

ELIZABETH MAGILL
b. 1959, Canada
Lives and works in London, UK and County Antrim, Ireland

Described by critic Isobel Haribson as “epic, enigmatic and evocative”, Elizabeth Magill’s highly idiosyncratic paintings present subjective and psychological takes on the landscape genre. Rich with kaleidoscopic patterning and fragmented forms, these vistas are embedded in place – usually rural settings on the edges of settlements – but transported through the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs or moods to be presented as something other: lush, visionary recollections of hills, lakes, hedges and skies glowing with ambient light. The term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s practice: landscapes not based on direct observation, but imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection. Though they have a cinematic beauty, her paintings can also be eerie or unsettling: trees or telephone wires conceal the view; birds are silhouetted in the dark; rare human figures feel distant, phantasmal; colours feel subdued, or occasionally toxic. Magill’s complex and densely layered paintings are produced using various techniques, at times incorporating stencilling, screenprinting and collage, as well as the pouring, blending, dripping, splashing and scraping away of paint. Film and photography are also central to her research, shaping the way the artist looks at landscape, and infusing her approach to light, tone and atmosphere.

Elizabeth Magill has had solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; PEER, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Milton Keynes Gallery; BALTIC, Gateshead; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Southampton City Art Gallery; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Limerick City Gallery of Art; and Ulster Museum, Belfast. Current/forthcoming exhibitions include Sacred Trust: Donations and their Legacy, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (from 10 April); Collecting Contemporary, British Museum, London, UK (Group, 25 April – 29 September) and Wilkinson Gallery, London (5 October – 10 November). Recent solo shows include Annelly Juda Fine Art, London (2023); Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2022) and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2021). Magill’s work can be found in the collections of the Tate, London; the British Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the Ulster Museum; the Crawford, Cork; the Government Art Collection, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN
b. 1978, Clare, Ireland
Lives and works in Cork, Ireland

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is an Irish artist working with film, computer-generated imagery, collage, tapestry, print and installation. Ní Bhriain’s work is rooted in an exploration of imperial legacy, human displacement and the Anthropocene. These intertwined subjects are approached through an associative use of narrative and a deeply crafted visual language that verges on the surreal. She sidesteps directive positions and familiar binaries, exposing instead the layers of ambiguity and contradiction embedded in these fraught issues. The resulting worlds she creates are at once idiosyncratic, irresistible and unsettling. Ní Bhriain’s Jacquard tapestry The Muses I is a photographic collage fusing early colonial or ‘Orientalist’ photographs with images of damaged quarry walls. The colonial archive is considered here in its strange duality as both cultural record and cultural disruption – its surface intent of preservation belying a deeper act of destruction. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work has been shown widely internationally, at venues including Broad Museum, Michigan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hammer Museum, LA; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Innsbruck International Biennial, Austria; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France and the 16th Lyon Biennale. Current and forthcoming exhibitions include An Experiment with Time, Kunsthal Gent, Belgium (Solo, 31 May – 31 December 2024); Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland and The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (both solo exhibitions, 2025). Recent solo exhibitions include Kerlin Gallery (2023); CCA Glasgow (2022); VISUAL Carlow; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (both 2019), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; and Sirius Art Centre, Cork (both 2018). Public collections include Dallas Museum of Art; MAC Lyon; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Trinity College Dublin; and The Arts Council of Ireland.

LILIANE TOMASKO
b. 1967, Zurich, Switzerland
Lives and works in London, UK

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour. The artist begins her investigation of the human psyche in the domestic sphere, offering attentive studies of bedding and clothing, the intimate textures of our lives. Through the artist’s reflections, these prosaic materials open a gateway into the nocturnal realm of sleep and dreaming, articulating the creatively fertile space between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Tomasko’s approach to abstraction is rooted, therefore, in the physical realm but ultimately transcends beyond it. Fusing material observation with intuition and association, the artist produces vigorous, imaginative expressions of familiar environments and psychological states. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadow, and painterly gesture allow space to come in and out of focus, oscillating between clarity and obscurity and emulating the atmospheric power of dreams and memories.

Tomasko’s current/upcoming solo exhibitions include Twofold, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (13 September – 19 October 2024). Recent solo exhibitions include The Artist’s Eye, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Name me not, CAB Burgos, Spain (both 2023); S P E L L O F T H E W O O D, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Evening Wind, Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York, USA (both 2022); Morpheus, Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, Germany (2021); dark goes lightly, Château la Coste, France (2019); Caja de sueños, Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; 12 nights x dreams, ROCA Rockland Center for the Arts, New York, USA (both 2018); Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami, USA (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Risky Business, Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles (2024); Austria–Germany Painting 1970 to 2020, Albertina Modern, Vienna (2023); Andy Warhol to Cecily Brown: from the collections of The Albertina, The Albertina (2022); Inventing Nature, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; From the Real: Liliane Tomasko & Sean Scully, Newlands House Gallery, Petworth House (both 2021) and Abstract Painting Now!, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2017).