Archives

Clement McAleer: Selected Paintings 1973 – 2023

Clement McAleer: Selected Paintings 1973 – 2023

14 October 2023 – 3 February 2024

The F.E. McWilliam Gallery is delighted to present a major survey exhibition of the work of Belfast based painter Clement McAleer. Born in Co. Tyrone, McAleer studied in Belfast, Canterbury and the Royal College of Art and was based in Liverpool for 25 years before returning to Northern Ireland in 2003.

The focus of McAleer’s paintings is landscape; not the particularities of place, but rather the restless, shifting aspects of nature where cloud or water, land or sea, meet and merge. The Irish coast is an enduring theme and travels in Europe and America have also inspired several works, particularly the series of railway paintings in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Recent reliefs, present abstracted landscapes glimpsed through windows or mediated by sculptural features reminiscent of Renaissance altarpieces.

McAleer has exhibited extensively in Dublin, Belfast, London and his work is included in public and corporate collections including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Arts Councils of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the European Parliament, Brussels. An artist appreciated by his peers but little known by the wider public. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to appreciate the quality and scope of McAleer’s work.

Free Admisssion

Eilis O’Connell: A Family of Things

Eilis O’Connell: A Family of Things

17 June – 30 September 2023

 

Eilis O’Connell: A Family of Things is the first major survey exhibition of one of Ireland’s most important contemporary artists. Including both previously unseen early sculptures and key examples of her work from throughout her career, the exhibition explores the development of O’Connell’s practice over almost five decades.

Born in Derry in 1953, O’Connell studied in Cork and Boston and spent several decades working in England where she was celebrated for her large-scale sculptures in steel, stone and bronze. Exploring how she has utilised a wide variety of media including resin, canvas and jesmonite and has incorporated found materials including moss, feathers, bones and birds’ nests into her work, this exhibition aims to reveal the diversity and innovation that is central to O’Connell’s practice.

An international fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors, O’Connell has an extensive exhibition history at home and internationally. However, her work has not received the public recognition it deserves. Initiated by the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Eilis O’Connell: A Family of Things aims to correct that omission and confirm O’Connell’s place in the canon of British and Irish art.