LONDON.- Vardaxoglou is presenting a solo exhibition with Irish artist Niamh O’Malley (b. 1975, Co. Mayo). It is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and includes new and previously unseen works incorporating graphite, wood, oil, glass, and metal. Niamh O’Malley represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

The exhibition features a series of artworks occupying the gallery at varying heights and scales. Folds of metal and wood balance high on steel rods and slabs of highly-worked graphite on panels sit propped against a wall. A large, oil on aluminium, painting, is painted in a layered tonal grisaille onto a primed aluminium sheet. O’Malley resists settling on an image, the works serving as documentation of a restless search for a still point to resolve or solve. In this way, they seem to present an obliteration of images.

Pencil and sandpaper, graphite powder and filler are used to make marks which in their compression – in their literal point and weight of lead on and in wood – become new surfaces. Simple wooden panels become weighty in the time they hold and in the potential images layered, obfuscated and eradicated in their making. One mark leads to another, whether it is made through cutting and shaping a piece of glass, or with oil on panel, laying down a structure and a context which both limits and defines its resolution.

In a text by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, he writes, ‘Much that remains characteristic of O’Malley’s work… includes her unique blend of the sensual with the schematic, as well as a kind of cat-and-mouse play between revelation and occlusion or, put more dramatically, between seduction and disenchantment.’

Niamh O’Malley was born in County Mayo in Ireland in 1975. In 2022, Niamh O’Malley represented Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale in the solo exhibition, ‘Gather’. After its success in Venice, the presentation travelled across three institutional locations in Ireland in the spring of 2023: Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin (2023); The Model, Sligo (2023); Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Niamh O’Malley: Lightbox, Grimm Gallery, New York (2024); Niamh O’Malley, Vardaxoglou Gallery, London (2023); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, IE (2019); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (2021); Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, IE (2019); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, AT (2018); Bluecoat Liverpool, UK (2015); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, IE (2017). O’Malley’s work is included in numerous private and public collections such as the FRAC Bretagne, France, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Hugh Lane, Dublin City Gallery; Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Arts Council of Ireland, Office of Public Works, Ireland; Stefan Stolitzka Collection, Graz; FRAC Méca-Nouvelle Aquitaine, France and Galleria Arte Moderna, Turin.