Artist: Gerard Byrne

Kerlin Gallery presents The Struggle With the Angel, a new exhibition by Gerard Byrne.

In Autumn 2008, Gerard Byrne bought a used camera from a friend for cash. For 17 years since that day, the camera (a Mamiya 7 analogue stills camera) has travelled far and wide with the artist, giving rise to an ongoing photographic project. The Struggle With the Angel presents the first comprehensive exhibition from this body of work.

The Struggle With the Angel revolves around a suite of selenium-toned silver gelatin photographs, each hand-printed by Byrne in a darkroom he built solely to produce this project. Pyramids in Mexico, the apex of a corrugated shed roof in Broadstone, Palestinian murals, the US Airforce, prone artists, prone marble nudes, graveyards, the deceased, St Francis, Gandhi, sons, mothers, friends, other artists, strangers. The field of references accumulated across these photographs is broad and tolerant.

While the references and motifs are diverse, the central question for Byrne is an ethical consideration of how photographs could connect worlds. Byrne’s project leans into the limitations of his Mamiya 7 camera (held together by rubber bands for the past few years), of film, and of his temporary darkroom, to accumulate a constellation of direct relations to people, places and times that contrasts starkly with the current photographic cultural paradigm. No computer, phone, AI software, or Instagram posts play any role in developing the photographs that make up this work. As such, the new work continues a recurring attitude present across Byrne’s practice, of recalling moments of cultural and technological bifurcation, namely the moment in which an idea splits into two possibilities, one of which is abandoned. Much of Byrne’s work has pondered those abandoned possibilities and alternative choices in the light of the current context.

Gerard Byrne
b. 1969, Dublin. Lives and works in Dublin

Working primarily with lens-based media, Gerard Byrne explores the paradoxical relationship between time and image. Looking at both highbrow and popular media, from the art press to men’s magazines, museum displays to commercial radio stations, Byrne meticulously documents and reconstructs the cultural ephemera of the last century. With deadpan humour, his works draw attention to the ways in which text, sound and image produce and transmit meaning, and how shifting contexts render this meaning impermanent. In particular his works have looked at the legacy of Modernism, evolving attitudes towards sexuality, and the move from collective sources of entertainment to the more fragmented media culture of the 21st Century. Never succumbing to nostalgia, Byrne’s analysis of the recent past and its mythologies tells us just as much about the present – how, far from being inevitable, the moment we live in is just one of a number of possible outcomes, and how alternative futures can live on through cultural artefacts.

Gerard Byrne has realised projects for many international exhibitions such as Skulptur Projekte Muenster (2017), Documenta 13, 54th Venice Biennale, and biennials in Sydney, Gwangju, Busan, Lyon, and Istanbul. His solo exhibitions include at Towner Eastbourne, UK (2024); Centraal Museum Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Void, Derry (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019), Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); ACCA, Melbourne (2016), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2015), FRAC Pays de la Loire (2014), Whitechapel Gallery (2013), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2011), IMMA (2011). In 2007 he represented Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has held professorships at the art academies of Copenhagen (2007–16) and at Staedelschule, Frankfurt (since 2018). In October 2024 together with Judith Wilkinson, he curated the first comprehensive survey of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre of German teleplays, presented at WKV Stuttgart.