Former Taoiseach to open Martin Gale exhibition at Mayo gallery

On November 22  from 4–6pm, Claremorris Gallery will host the official launch of a new exhibition of paintings by Martin Gale, which will be opened by former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny.

The connection between Martin Gale and former Taoiseach 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.

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