Gary Coyle, Ghost, charcoal on paper, 152 x 170 cm, 2024 - 2025

13th February 2025 @ 6:00pm – Exhibition

Exhibition: Gary Coyle | Terra Cognita

Terra Cognita, Gary Coyle’s first exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh since 2020’s Dreaming Different Dreams, finds us on familiar ground, where the artist employs the same methodology and revisits many of the themes and motifs he has explored over the years.

Once again, the gallery walls have been covered with a large-scale immersive wall drawing made on a digital drawing tablet – this time it’s of a wet, dank monocultural Sitka Spruce Forest. It is based on a tiny screen grab culled from the Internet, its hallucinatory colors derived from a room in The Wallace Collection, the artist’s favorite museum. It has been skillfully remixed and reimagined by designer Oonagh Young, providing a setting for and foil to the unframed, intensively worked charcoal drawings that have been pinned on top, in which, Coyle picks up where he last left off.

The barn owl in Ghost is a successor to the artist’s previous drawings of cats, part super cute meme, part harbinger of menace and death (via owl painter extraordinaire Hieronymus Bosch). The owl stands in the immediate foreground of a Claudian-style landscape, with beautiful trees and a heavy sky. In the distance, standing on an outcrop, is that staple of the Gothic, the haunted house, which is based on the watchtower at Dalkey Quarry. This tower has stood guard, looking down over all of Dun Laoghaire since the early 1800s, where a friend of his tragically died many years ago. Too wit too wooo.

FROM

13th February 2025
—15th March 2025

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