8^th March – 26^th April

New Neighbours

Olivia O’Dwyer & Fergal Styles

New Neighbours brings together the work of Olivia O’Dwyer and Fergal Styles for the first time. Both artists work come from places of imagination and memory, of things half-remembered or dreamt, with playfulness and experimentation at the heart of each of their practices.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a newly commissioned text by Neva Elliot. (You can download the essay either below on a mobile device, or to the right of the page, if viewing on a desktop.)

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Olivia O’Dwyer’s work is influenced by 'Bad Painting' which refers to a deliberately raw style of figurative painting, rejecting traditional ideas of draughtsmanship, mixing art historical, popular, and personal sources. She examines ideas around quotidian experience, observations drawn from the world around her and more intimate or personal themes and looks to contemporary culture and ideologies drawn from a female perspective and the ‘female gaze’ feminist theory.

For Fergal Styles the image represents “an irrational, compact impression of sensory and emotional information” made up of feelings and imagination. He approaches painting in a very egalitarian way, no medium is ruled out even those usually not associated with painting, for him mediums/materials have their own cultural references or weight and he values the associations these bring to the work.