Ghosts of Babylon Exhibition
Venue: LHQ Gallery, County Library Floor 1Town: Cork city
Time: 10:00am - 8:00pm
Phone: 021 4285995
Email: arts@corkcoco.ie
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Booking Required: No
Info
Ghosts of Babylon is an exhibition of new painting work created by Cork based Irish artist Pascal Ungerer. This exhibition is taking place at the LHQ Gallery at the County Library, in association with Cork County Library and Arts Services. Ghosts of Babylon initially started during Pascal’s residency at the Uillinn West Cork Art Centre in 2020, at a time that coincided with the first COVID-19 lockdown. Pascal has continued to develop this work throughout the past 18 months at Backwater Studios in Cork where he is currently doing a 12-month project residency. Much of Pascal’s work looks at peripheral landscapes on the margins or urban development and in rural hinterlands. This exhibition brings together some of his most recent paintings where he focuses on empty, liminal landscapes.
Please Note: 11 people permitted in the gallery at any one time: this is subject to change in line with Government guidelines. Visitors must wear a mask and maintain social distancing.
Pascal Ungerer is an Irish visual artist originally from West Cork. He has a background in lens-based media and in recent years has focused on developing his painting practice. His thematic interests are primarily concerned with spatial cultures in the context of peripherality and place. His work often examines the in-between spaces that lie at the intersection of the urban and rural. Much of his most recent painting work looks at liminal landscapes in the hinterlands and on the margins of human habitation. He often looks at these landscapes ‘as temporal with a cyclical flux between abandonment and emptiness to development and habitation’. He is drawn to unusual structures and topographies as well as places that have storied, hidden or layered histories. For Pascal, many of these places represent a kind of ‘otherness’ in a sometimes bleak and foreboding environment. Most of his paintings are fictional landscapes that amalgamate different places and ideas into a metaphorical space to reflect upon wider socio-geographic issues, but these paintings are also intrinsically linked to the places and stories that have inspired them. He is interested in people’s connections to place and land and the wider perception of the natural and built environment and the interrelationship between these two contrasting spaces. In this new work he brings together many of his interests in abandonment, peripherality and otherness into these pensive and empty landscapes, places that are always devoid of people but are punctuated by traces of humanity.