New art exhibition opens in Claremorris

A new exhibition of paintings by renowned artist Martin Gale was opened at Claremorris Gallery last Saturday by former Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Born in Worcester, England in 1949, Martin Gale is a distinguished Irish painter whose work probes the interplay between humans, animals, and the contemporary Irish landscape with a quietly unsettling realism. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (1968–1973), and shortly afterwards held his first solo show in the Neptune Gallery. In 1980, he represented Ireland at the XI Biennale de Paris, and two years later he was elected to Aosdána, the association honouring outstanding Irish artists. In 1996, he became a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), and in 2013 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by NUI Maynooth. 

His work has been the subject of a major retrospective at the RHA Gallagher Gallery which later travelled to the Ulster Museum, and his paintings feature in leading public and private collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland. Most recently, at the 195th RHA Annual Exhibition (Summer 2025), Gale won the Hanley Energy Sustainability Excellence Award for his landscape painting, The Return (Re-wilding), highlighting both his continued relevance and his commitment to themes of nature, renewal, and place.

The connection between Martin Gale and Enda Kenny began with a small painting presented to Mr Kenny by the National University of Ireland, Galway Foundation. Some time after receiving the work, and following his retirement from politics, Mr Kenny contacted Gale to learn more about the piece. This initiated a friendly exchange of emails that continued over time, though plans to meet in person were later postponed due to the onset of Covid. With Claremorris Gallery having sparked their original connection, Gallery Director Rosemarie Noone felt that the former Taoiseach was the natural choice to open the exhibition.

In this exhibition, In the Land, Martin Gale continues his quietly arresting exploration of the Irish landscape - its myths, its tensions, and the strange beauty that flickers at the edges of the everyday. These paintings bring together an unexpected cast of motifs: wolves appearing at dusk, circus tents pitched incongruously in open fields, and the looping doughnut rings carved into empty beaches by “little boy racers”. Each image seems at once familiar and uncanny, rooted in real places yet touched by something dreamlike and unsettling.

Gale’s wolves move through the landscape with a sense of wary sovereignty. They act as both symbols and intruders, hinting at the return of something wild and ungovernable beneath the surface of rural life. The circus tents, meanwhile, introduce a more overt theatricality - bright, temporary structures poised against vast, unpeopled horizons. They suggest spectacle and escape, but also fragility, as though the show might evaporate at any moment, leaving only the wind.

In contrast, the doughnut rings - those looping marks left by night-time joyrides - carry a peculiarly human presence without ever showing a figure. They speak to bravado, boredom, and the small rebellions that animate otherwise quiet places. Gale paints them not as mere vandalism but as fleeting signatures, the evidence of lives lived at the margins.

Across all these works, Gale maintains his characteristic precision: crisp light, deep shadows, and a meticulous attention to surface. But beneath this clarity lies ambiguity -a sense that something is about to happen, or has just happened, unseen. The result is a landscape that feels alive with stories, both whispered and unresolved.

This exhibition invites viewers to dwell in that in-between space: where the ordinary becomes strange, where the rural becomes symbolic, and where the world we think we know reveals its deeper, more mysterious layers.

In the Land will be on display at Claremorris Gallery until December 13th. The gallery opening hours are from 1 to 6pm, Wednesday to Saturday, or by appointment, text 087-7912337.