Kerlin Gallery

About the Gallery
Established in Dublin 1988, Kerlin Gallery has built an international reputation by providing sustained and meaningful representation for leading contemporary Irish and international artists.

For over three and a half decades, the gallery’s programme has reflected trends in international contemporary art with significant solo shows of Dorothy Cross, Liam Gillick, Willie Doherty, Siobhán Hapaska, Callum Innes, Merlin James, Albert Oehlen, Sean Scully and Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lawrence Weiner and Nathalie Du Pasquier among others.

In recent years, the gallery has introduced a new generation of artists working across diverse media including Gerard Byrne, Hannah Fitz, Sam Keogh, Aleana Egan, Marcel Vidal and Liliane Tomasko. In 2023 artists Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Nathalie du Pasquier and Justin Fitzpatrick joined the gallery.

The gallery continues to publish artists’ catalogues and monographs independently and in association with public institutions, including in career spanning monographs for Dorothy Cross, Merlin James, Mark Francis, William McKeown and Isabel Nolan and currently Siobhan Hapaska in association with Kunst Museum St. Gallen & Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.

Many of Kerlin Gallery’s artists have participated in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and the Turner Prize, including Dorothy Cross, Gerard Byrne, Willie Doherty, Liam Gillick, Siobhán Hapaska, Callum Innes, Merlin James, Isabel Nolan, Kathy Prendergast and Sean Scully, amongst others.

About the Presentation
Kerlin Gallery will present a three-person booth by Aleana Egan, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and Liliane Tomasko at Independent. Each artist will debut new works at the fair, including painting, sculpture and tapestry.

The presentation includes The Muses IV, the latest instalment in Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s acclaimed ongoing series of Jacquard tapestries. Using photographic collage to fuse early colonial or ‘Orientalist’ photographs with images of damaged quarry walls, The Muses highlights the strange duality of the colonial archive – its surface intent of preservation belying a deeper act of destruction. 

Also presented for the first time is a new large-scale diptych by Liliane Tomasko. Opening up spatial possibility, the twofold format of this painting allows tone, form and texture to dialogue back and forth across surfaces, sparking new resonances and shaping our understanding of each panel in relation to its neighbour. Like much of Tomasko’s oeuvre, the work appears abstract but bears deep and tangled connections to the pictorial and narrative worlds, shaped by the artist’s longstanding interest in mythologies. 

Finally, the booth includes a new sculptural work and recent paintings by Aleana Egan. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes.