Colin Davidson: Selected Paintings 1986 – 2022

11 June – 10 September 2022

Over the last decade, Northern Irish artist Colin Davidson has gained international renown for his large-scale portraits of actors, musicians, writers and politicians. While portraiture is the most visible manifestation of his practice, it is only one element of a multifaceted oeuvre, the result of an artist continually striving to challenge himself and explore new territory. This curiosity has produced nudes, still life, landscapes and recently explorations into three dimensions. In fact, until 2010, Davidson was best known for urban scenes, initially atmospheric views of Belfast from above and later, complex renderings of life in London and New York reflected in the glazed surfaces of office buildings.

Colin Davidson: Selected Paintings 1986 – 2022, which opens at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery this June, explores the relationships and connections between these two distinct but related elements of Davidson’s art. Co-curated by Riann Coulter and Kim Mawhinney, Senior Curator at National Museums NI, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to appreciate the consistency and quality of Davidson’s practice through the decades.

Sculptors at Work: Photographs by Anne-Katrin Purkiss

F.E. McWilliam Gallery until Autumn 2021

When Anne-Katrin Purkiss photographed F.E. McWilliam in London in 1989, neither could have envisaged that, more than 30 years later, the image would hang in a museum dedicated to the sculptor in his birthplace, Banbridge, County Down. In the years since that serendipitous meeting, Anne-Katrin Purkiss has photographed dozens of sculptors, often in their studios.

Sculptors at Work includes a selection of 40 of these portraits. Some, like McWilliam’s friend Elisabeth Frink, are engaged in the physical act of making. Others, including Irish artist Eva Rothschild, appear to wait patiently for the process to be over so that they can get back to work. The artists included represent the diversity of contemporary sculpture, which is no longer limited by materials, permanence, gender or ethnicity.  A selection of work by artists including Frink, Kenneth Armitage, Tim Shaw, Geoffrey Clarke and Rana Begum, loaned by public and private collections, will be exhibited alongside the portraits reminding us that the origins of these images are in the act of making.