DUBLIN.- Kerlin Gallery presents Pictures of You, guest curated by Miles Thurlow (Co-founder of WORKPLACE).
The exhibition brings together 16 international and multigenerational artists, whose images, objects and actions evoke specific, often fleeting, moments whilst simultaneously revealing incisive reflections on time, memory and social structures.
Hannah Perry’s large-scale installation Rage Fluids weaves through Pictures of You both physically and sonically, with huge sheets of curved metal and car wrap activated by the rumbling sound and vibrational energy of car stereo subwoofers. Similarly influenced by the industrial context of the North of England, Simeon Barclay references his father’s work as a tailor and childhood memories of playing dress-up in Pop Pose, rupturing the fashion industry’s veneer of cool. Ryan Gander presents iconic modernist chairs – Gerrit Rietveld’s crate chair, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily B3 – overturned and covered in a marble ‘snow’, teasing out a web of issues around class, aspiration, manufacturing, and taste.
Drawing upon a rich archive of anonymous analogue photographs, Laura Lancaster transforms deeply personal memories into shimmering, impressionistic images that transcend their source material and tap into a broader collective memory. Eve Ackroyd’s small, intimate paintings explore the interpersonal dynamics of familial relationships and friendships, as well as her interiority and reflections on quotidian life. Sooim Jeong’s exuberant, expressive paintings capture heightened moments of anxiety and melodrama. Upturned legs in pond suggest a disastrous event, but light handling of paint and a pastel palette give the subject a lightness of touch and disarming gentleness.
James Cabaniuk’s tactile paintings give abstract forms to queer erotic encounters. Bodily fluids and bodily contact are insinuated through glittering, polychromatic surfaces, sprayed and hand-smeared paint, and distorted, suggestive forms. William McKeown’s paintings were guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling. Taking on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, he presented us with so much more: nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. Nan Goldin captures her friend and collaborator, the Irish artist/filmmaker Vivienne Dick, in a moment of cosmic wonder on an isolated beach, then turns the lens outwards to a lavender-infused, psychedelic vision of the Donegal coast. Merlin James’s paintings depict vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes and moments of intimacy. His paintings of isolated buildings invited us to ruminate on distance and connection.
Hollis Frampton’s 1969 video piece Lemon gives a close study of a single citrus fruit, its devotional gaze drawing out the fruit’s bodily and sculptural qualities, and transforming a humble everyday object into something meditative and profound. Ki Yoong’s small-scale, intimate portraits have the feel of a small shrine or devotional object. Closely cropped to frame their subjects’ faces, each work captures a vulnerability and sense of deep connection between artist and sitter. Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s photographs deromanticise the popularly sentimental and yet their sensitivity to light, framing and texture give them a cinematic quality. Responding to the increasingly dematerialised nature of contemporary image making, Cunnane remains connected to the physicality of the production process, printing his photographs by hand in a darkroom.
Rachel Lancaster’s luminous paintings give cinematic depictions of mostly female subjects, building colour and depth using meticulous Renaissance techniques. Robin Megannity painstakingly creates digital environments using 3D graphics software, which then become the source material for his otherworldly paintings. Referencing Northern European still life paintings and using traditional techniques, they nevertheless include the glitches, ruptures and defamiliarised atmosphere of their digital origins. Wang Pei treats the eternally-intriguing subject of the human form is treated with delicacy and attentiveness. Using casein tempera, an ancient form of paint derived from milk, his paintings offer a deliberate ‘slowing down’ of image-making.
Eve Ackroyd
b. 1984, UK
Eve Ackroyd seeks out stories of female friendship and motherhood, celebrating sublime andintimate moments of quotidian life. She treats the figure—whether human or otherwise—as a vessel through which to explore candor and humor, secrets and surprise. Ackroyd studied painting at Chelsea College of Art & Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. Recent shows include Fifth Floor Apartment, Turn Gallery, New York; La Banda, TV Projects, New York; Within Without, Project Art Space, New York; Interior Landscapes, Assembly Room, New York; Living and Real, Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia; Sweet Cheeks, Big Pictures, LA and Subject III, Cob Gallery, London.
Simeon Barclay
b. 1975, Huddersfield, UK
Simeon Barclay draws upon a rich vein of pop cultural sources, producing works that activate complex cultural histories and exploring the ways in which we navigate identity. Combining a diverse range of media, Barclay engages with aspects of aesthetics, British culture, subjectivity and memory. Barclay spent his formative years working in the manufacturing industry in the North of England and this background feeds into his work – addressing narrow constructions of masculinity, as well as informing his use of glossy surfaces and industrial fabrication techniques. Barclay has a BA from Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds (2010) and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London (2014). He has exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Southbank Centre, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, London; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Workplace Foundation, Gateshead; Holden Gallery, Manchester; The Tetley, Leeds; Cubitt Gallery, London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Jerwood Space, London; Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Arcadia Missa, New York; W139, Amsterdam and British Art Show 9.
James Cabaniuk
b. 1987, Carlisle, UK
James Cabaniuk employs abstraction and strategies of queer opacity and temporalities to construct thickly layered large scale abstract oil paintings. Seeking to liberate personal trauma from shame, and exploring queer identity and history, the authoritative singularity and machismo of 20th Century Abstract Expressionist painting becomes a world wherein Cabaniuk navigates their own complex relationship to the power it embodies – simultaneously fetishising and critiquing it. Cabaniuk lives and works between Manchester and London. They have a BA from Chelsea College of Arts (2015) and MFA from Goldsmiths, London (2023). Their work has been shown at Workplace, Queer Direct, Almanac and Lima Zulu, all in London; Slugtown, Newcastle; ARTLAND, Milan; All Welcome, Vilnius; and as part of the ongoing curatorial project Archeology (various locations, UK) with artist Jamie Bradley.
Samuel Laurence Cunnane
b. 1989, Co. Kerry, Ireland
Samuel Laurence Cunnane works with analogue photography, capturing scenes with a detached “floating eye” perspective. Whether in Guangzhou, Tehran, the Balkans, or his native Kerry, Cunnane is drawn to the unnoticed periphery: the outskirts of the city, where plants battle with concrete; the edges of housing developments, where newly built homes surround mounts of upturned earth; the frontier between interior and exterior, demarcated by fences, windows, topiary. Cunnane has had solo exhibitions at Villa Concordia, Bamberg, Germany (2025); Öktem&Aykut, Istanbul (2025, 2021, 2017); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2024, 2020, 2015); OCT Boxes Museum of Art, Shunde, China (2018); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2016) and THEODORE: Art, New York (2015).
Hollis Frampton
b. 1936, Wooster, OH, USA, d. 1984, Buffalo, NY, USA
Hollis Frampton is known for the broad and restless intelligence he brought to the films he made, beginning in the early 1960s, until his death in 1984. In addition to being an important experimental filmmaker, he was also an accomplished photographer and writer, and in the 1970s made significant contributions to the emerging field of computer science. He is considered one of the pioneers of what has come to be termed structuralism, an influential style of experimental filmmaking that uses the basic elements of cinematic language to create works that investigate film form at the expense of traditional narrative content. Along with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, he is one of the major figures to emerge from the New York avant-garde film community of the 1960s.
Ryan Gander
b. 1976, Chester, UK
Ryan Gander has established an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms – from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more besides. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, as well as a reinvention of both the modes of appearance and the creation of an artwork. Gander lives and works in Suffolk and London. Recent solo shows include Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands (2025); Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan (2025); Museo Helga de Alvear, Caceres, Spain (2024); Ishikawa Cultural Foundation, Okayama, Japan (2023); Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); East Gallery at NUA, Norwich, UK (2022); Space K, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2019). Major projects include dOCUMENTA (13); 54th Venice Biennale; Performa 15, New York; Liverpool Biennial; Biennale of Sydney; British Art Show 8; Panorama, High Line, New York; Locked Room Scenario, commissioned by Artangel, London; Intervals, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Happy Prince, Public Art Fund, Central Park, New York.
Nan Goldin
b. 1953, Washington DC, USA
Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, and including herself as a subject, Nan Goldin’s work has transformed the role of photography in contemporary art. Her photographs and moving-image works address essential themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality. Uniting art and activism, Goldin has confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s and today brings international attention to the overdose crisis. Goldin has had solo exhibition in many of the world’s leading museums, including MoMA, New York; Tate, London; IMMA, Dublin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Louvre, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; National Museum, Prague; Rencontres d’Arles and many more.
Merlin James
b. 1960, Cardiff, UK
Merlin James approaches the history and legacy of painting with a highly considered and unconventional viewpoint. As commented by Artforum’s Sherman Sam, his work “has sought to rigorously problematise the experience of painting while simultaneously deepening its formal language”. Generally small in scale, his works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy. James has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Venice Biennale, Wales Pavilion; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; KW Institute, Berlin; Kunstsaele, Berlin; CCA, Glasgow; Kunstverein, Freiberg; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; OCT, Shunde & Shenzhen; Anton Kern, New York; Philadelphia Art Alliance.
Sooim Jeong
b. 1983, South Korea
Sooim Jeong’s practice draws upon a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Jeong’s approach is informed by learning traditional calligraphy as a teenager in Korea. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images within the confined space of the canvas. Sooim Jeong is a London-based Korean artist who holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2010) and a BA Fine Art from Kookmin University, Seoul (2007). She has exhibited widely including Unit 1 Gallery (2021), Royal Academy, London (2020), Mostyn, Llandudno (2019), Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2017), SÍM Gallery, Reykjavík (2017), Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2016), Block 336, London (2016), Interview Room 11, Edinburgh (2014) and The Lightbox Museum, Woking (2014). She has been shortlisted for the Mostyn Open 21 (2019), the Exeter Contemporary Open (2017) and Marmite Prize for Painting V (2016).
Laura Lancaster
b. 1979, Hartlepool, UK
The figure is central to the work of Laura Lancaster, its presence intensified by the opposing entropic force of abstraction which perpetually subsumes and engulfs the protagonist. Images that are of their era – located in time through incidental clues such as clothing, pose, and contingent detail – are monumentalised by Lancaster through painting. Rendered ambiguous through the looseness of her brushwork, images gleaned from found photographic images are dissociated from their specific context and orphaned from their original narrative to be re-presented as fragments. Lancaster lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. Current exhibitions include Remember, Somewhere, a two-person show with Rachel Lancaster, BALTIC, Gateshead, 12 April – 12 October. Recent solo exhibitions include Closer and Further Away, Workplace, London; Inside The Mirror, Wooson Gallery, South Korea; Running Towards Nothing, Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Laura Lancaster, New Art Gallery, Walsall; and A Stranger’s Dream, Sargent’s Daughters, New York.
Rachel Lancaster
b. 1979, Hartlepool, UK
Rachel Lancaster’s practice is focused on painting and its intersections with the languages of cinema, music and photography. Working from an archive of photographic ‘stills’ from found moving imagery, alongside her own photographs, Lancaster translates images into into oil paintings that represent detailed fragments of a greater narrative. She is drawn to seemingly insignificant passing shots, extreme close ups of inanimate objects, commonplace domestic interiors. Divorced physically from their position within a narrative structure, these paintings become abstract, ambiguous and open-ended, drawing out the uncanny and potential psychological charge. Rachel Lancaster lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. Current exhibitions include Remember, Somewhere, a two-person show with Laura Lancaster, BALTIC, Gateshead, 12 April – 12 October. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, UK; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan and Venice, Italy; Royal Academy, London, UK; Rye Art Gallery, Kent, UK; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK; Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Kotti-Shop, Berlin, Germany.
William McKeown
b. 1962, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland; d. 2011, Edinburgh, UK
William McKeown made paintings, drawings, prints and installations that captured the openness and life-enhancing power of nature. Many of his paintings are scaled roughly to the size of the human chest, as if mirroring the capacity of our lungs to breathe in air. Sometimes presented in ‘room installations’, wooden structures with wallpaper, windows and artificial light that mimic a clinical setting, his works act as windows out onto the world – an escape from the repression and mundanity of everyday life and into the lightness and expansiveness of the sky, using subtle gradations of tone to create moments of exquisite beauty and bliss. Current/forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show at The MAC, Belfast (9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026) and Coalescence: Happenstance, curated by Paul O’Neill at Shimmer Shimmer, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1 December 2024 – 30 November 2025). Solo exhibitions include Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, curated by Jonathan Anderson; Dallas Museum of Art; LOEWE Design District Store, Miami; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; mima, Middlesbrough; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. In 2005, McKeown represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale.
Robin Megannity
b. 1985, North-West, UK
Historical techniques and traditions of painting are appropriated and quoted in Robin Megannity’s work. The artist fuses the pathos, melancholy and solemnity of Northern European still life paintings with references to digital image-making. Glitches and ruptures connect the temporality of historical source imagery with commonplace contemporary means of media manipulation. Similarly, the anodyne and lifeless simulations of computer renderings or product advertising are imbued with the historical weight and meaning of painting, pulling them out of the virtual and lending them authenticity. Megannity is based in Greater Manchester, UK. He holds an MA Painting from Manchester School of Art (2021) and BA Fine Art from University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (2007). Selected solo exhibitions include Call of the Void, Workplace, London (2023); ferme la fenêtre, Kristian Day Gallery, London (2021); Goes Without Saying, Bunker Gallery, Manchester (2019); and Compression, Studios Gallery, New Mills (2014).
Wang Pei
b. 1989, China
In the work of Wang Pei, tightly cropped faces are rendered on canvas with meticulous and unwavering detail. Brooding dramatic tension is heightened by the murky chiaroscuro of a darkened background. Depictions of the face and body align with our innate human reflex and desires that are exploited by digital platforms to feed our perpetual engagement. Wang’s use of casein tempera – an ancient form of paint derived from milk and laden with historical and biological connotations – stands as a defiant affirmation of the tactile and the temporal. Wang Pei lives and works in Barcelona. He holds a BA Sculpture (2012) and MA Oil Painting (2015) from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou and a PhD in Medieval Studies from University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain (2021). Selected exhibitions include Episode II: Home and Away, Matt Carey-Williams, London (2024); The Enneagram Mask, Workplace, London (2024); Prophetic Dreams, Kutlesa Gallery, Basel (2024); Vitalis Violentia, Podium Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); Mute, Tara Downs, New York (2024); Notes Toward a Shell, Tara Downs, New York (2024); Shape of times, Yi Gallery, HangZhou, China (2021).
Hannah Perry
b. 1984, Chester, UK
Hannah Perry works across installation, sculpture, print and video. Continuously generating and manipulating materials (footage, sound clips, images and objects), Perry develops a sprawling network of references, carefully exploring personal memory in today’s hyper-technological society whilst bending back the systems of representation via hyperactive distribution. She is guided by music or speech, repetition, focalisation and deceleration, revealing the strength of our personal investment in images of the illusory (youth, power, sex, taste, lifestyle) as well as the prescriptive nature of these desires. Perry lives and works in London. She has a BA Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, London and MA from Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Manual Labour, BALTIC, Gateshead (2024–5); NTNT, Chester Contemporary, Chester (2023); The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art, Bentonville (2021); A Smashed Window and an Empty Room, Kunstverein Hamburg (2019); GUSH, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2019); Liquid Language, MOCA Toronto (2019); GUSH, Somerset House, London (2018); Rage Fluids, Künstlerhaus, Gratz (2018); and ICA London (2015).
Ki Yoong
b. 1988, Bradford, UK
Ki Yoong’s paintings are marked by a quiet tenderness, underscored by his distinctive use of tightly cropped compositions. This deeply personal gesture focuses the gaze whilst suggesting intimacy and connection. The removal of visual information also opens space for projection, inviting the viewer to bring their own associations and memories into the process of looking. Rendered with meticulous detail, Yoong’s diminutive paintings are constructed from many translucent layers of oil paint, each applied with a tiny brush in a process akin to drawing. Rather than bold, expressive brushstrokes, Yoong favours subtle accumulation, fine gestures that coalesce into images that are concurrently precise and ephemeral. Ki Yoong lives and works in London. Yoong has a BA Fine Art from University of Leeds (2010) and MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2013). Recent exhibitions include Figurative Impressions, Hurst Contemporary, London (2024); Studio West, MEGA Art Fair, Milan (2024); Marilyn, Plop Residency, London (2024); The Blush Upon Her Cheek, Studio West, London (2024); Faces/Faces, Slugtown, Newcastle (2023); The Picture, Brooke Benington, London (2023); Skin Deep, Studio West, London (2023); A Celebration of Portraiture, Marlborough Gallery, London (2023).
Miles Thurlow
Born in Colchester in 1975, Miles Thurlow finished his MFA at Newcastle University in 2000. Alongside Paul Moss, he opened Workplace in 2003 as an artist-led organisation before opening Workplace Gallery in an empty shop beneath Gateshead’s brutalist ‘Get Carter Car Park’ in 2005. The duo secured the gallery’s first space for just £1 a year in exchange for judging Gateshead Indoor Markets’ Annual Christmas Card competition. Its artist-first ethos has continued to shape the gallery’s approach as it has grown. In 2013, Workplace opened a second space in London, establishing a vital link between the North Eastern art scene and the UK capital. In 2017, Thurlow and Moss launched Workplace Foundation, focusing on uplifting artists outside of the mainstream gallery scenes. Now led by Thurlow, after Moss passed away in 2019, the gallery now represents a roster of 12 artists across two venues, in London’s Fitzrovia and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Workplace also participates in international art fairs, and continues to build networks on both local and international levels through exchange and collaboration.
