Situated | Darryl Vance at the Kinvara Courthouse

Event Details

Kinvara Area Visual Artists (KAVA) are pleased to present a new exhibition, Darryl Vance: Situated, opening Friday, August 29th, 2025 with a public reception from 7 to 9pm at The Courthouse in Kinvara, County Galway. The exhibition will open with remarks by artist and musician Cath Taylor and music by singer songwriter Mick Brown. The gallery will be open daily from 11am until 5pm through Sunday, September 7th.
In this new work, artist Darryl Vance continues his exploration of the transformative qualities of paint. Developing his process over the past eight years, Vance has arrived at works of increasing complexity, bold colour and uneasy coherence. Juxtaposing the classic modernism of Mondrian, Paul Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright with the aesthetics of funk and the handmade, his geometry is surprisingly warm, inviting and sensual. His work appears initially comforting, yet on closer viewing subtle tensions emerge.

“I’ve been using this method of painting – slicing up cardboard moving boxes into rectangles and then painting and arranging them – as a way to imagine the notion of dramatic change and to channel it into something unexpected,” Vance explains. “`It became a way of using painting without making a picture of something, which is kind of funny considering the new series I’m doing.”

Over the past few years, as he became settled in the village of Kinvara, Vance began to look at his place in it. “So many things came to mind. The land and the things on it – livestock, boats, buildings in all states of ruin, walls, hedges – compelled me to paint a sort of ‘thank you’ note to it all.” he says.

Last year he came upon an idea for a different tool to paint with: rushes. “I’d learned to make Brigid’s crosses with them, and it got me thinking that they were an apt tool to use in painting about this place.” Vance would later find out they’re quite versatile, and depending on how many you use, the strokes can be broad as a broom or needle thin. He continues, “I use them to add paint and also add texture, making a subtle surface of marks and patterns that recall the ancient and the prehistoric.”

Combining those wild Irish weeds with the usual brushes and palette knives lets Vance continue the nervous energy of his geometric paintings. His new series depicts more familiar aspects of the world through the artist’s idiosyncratic vision. A cow stands in a boat, a Flake bar in its back. A sunken boat creates a small bowl of calm water. A herd of painted rocks. A broken necklace.

“The subjects all seem to have a peculiar narrative in common: that something has happened to them.”

Together with his painted cardboard sculptures – “house-shaped paintings” as Vance calls them – the exhibition’s trio of simultaneous series embodies the work of an endlessly inquisitive creativity.

Darryl Vance (American-Irish, b.1954) is a visual artist living in Kinvara, County Galway. His work is shown and collected internationally, most recently selected for Ballinglen Art Museum’s Biennial. Other juried shows include Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar (2023), Art Fair in Waterford (2021), The Courthouse in Ennistymon (2019), and The Westport Music + Arts Festival (2018 and 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include The Galway Fringe Festival (2020), A Space Gallery (2020) and KAVA (2017, 2019 and 2023). He was awarded a BFA from The Atlanta College of Art and has worked in photography, video, public media, performance, conceptual art and painting.

Cath Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist and musician.

Mick Brown is a Galway-based singer, songwriter, folk musician and community music facilitator.