Exhibition continues from the 4th of September to the 11th of October 2025
Brigitte Mulholland is thrilled to present Niamh O’Malley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. O’Malley, (b. 1975, Mayo, Ireland) currently lives and works in Dublin and has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including the Irish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale in 2022. Her sculptures make tangible the act of trying: trying to grasp a certain slant of light, to contemplate the enormity of a landscape, to hold moments still. This exhibition features sculptures made of steel, wood, and glass, as well as a film. In the gallery’s Salon, the artist presents a separate series of works made of graphite and watercolour on panel, which serve as a complement to (and sometimes studies for) her sculptures and their forms.
O’Malley’s glass sculptures are composed of shards of glass that are cut, wrapped in copper foil, and soldered together into configurations that protrude gently from the wall, both casting and holding light. Glass, with its implicit translucence and fragility, also embodies a state of solidity: a material with its own depth and colour, it can be looked at, as well as looked through. While there is a lack of surface absorption in the glass, the panels stand in contrast: dark, opaque surfaces that retain marks and memory. Each of them is embedded with the artist’s hand: scribbling, sanding, and moulding the edges with her fingers.
A number of Shelf works are included, which gather many of the sculptural materials O’Malley employs: wood, glass, and metal. The shelf becomes the ground and support of her compositions, facilitating the careful – yet simultaneously barely tethered – arrangement of components, eliciting both a strength and a delicate tension. Other sculptures in the exhibition include Leafs, where long, slender steel rods protrude from hammered steel shapes, part foliage, part strange, elegant weights. In Eye, two thin sheets of raw steel are folded into overhangs – each with cutouts that resemble soft fingers or lashes, and each sheltering a sun of amber glass. The stark solidity of the grey steel contrasts, yet complements, the fragile glow of the glass. The film offers viewers another kind of touch – its material enquiry bringing us back into a kinetic reality where the hand and the eye scan and search and seek form and solidity.
While her practice may seem visually diverse, O’Malley uses a small repertoire of materials whose nature and limitations have, over time, become a formative part of her artistic process. She is interested in what attracts our attention and why; in how we move our bodies towards particular views or situations; in how we look at, frame, and touch the chaos of the world. As Lizzie Lloyd noted in her text for the Venice Biennale: “O’Malley’s objects are replete with edges that outline, overlap, and neighbour other edges. Their meeting points accentuate buffed, pitted, powdered and polished surfaces over which our eye catches and slips…Hers is a material inquiry but with social and political implications built on necessary contingencies in which one part depends on another.”
With many thanks to Culture Ireland for its support of this exhibition.
