Episodes in the Obscure

Episodes in the Obscure

Solo exhibition of new work by Niall Naessens, Sponsored by IPUT Real Estate Dublin

Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin
Through the Arch, Cope Street, Dublin 2, D02 X021

Graphic Studio Gallery presents Episodes in the Obscure, a collection of new large scale work by Niall Naessens. This exhibition is generously sponsored by IPUT Real Estate Dublin.

Naessens lives in rural Kerry, where the night sky remains largely untouched by light pollution. This darkness gives clarity to the Milky Way and the constellations above. Many of the works are set on quiet mountain roads and along the Kerry coastline, referencing specific places: the roads Naessens drives and the coastline he walks. As Naessens describes it: “Employing references and observation embellished with memory and invention, these new works describe incidents around the periphery of the night.”

Acknowledging his maturing interest in Romanticism and the sublime, Naessens seeks to portray the world in fantastic compositions — effecting, in his words, “a kind of wondrous reality.” Insects, the moon, constellations, passing cars and bonfires illuminate these nocturnes, each one alluding to an episode from an ambiguous, half-remembered story.

Cars recur throughout the collection as familiar, almost totemic presences. Among them, the beams of a Ford Anglia, catch the sea just enough to guide night swimmers in. Others feature a Morris Minor and a Beetle – these aren’t generic vehicles, they carry the specific, nostalgic weight of cars once known, once driven, or remembered from another time. Paired with the sparse light of rural Kerry, they give the work a strong sense of nostalgia. For the viewer, some of these images may feel less like observed scenes than half-remembered ones, as though glimpsed once from a passing car window and carried in memory ever since.

The works in this exhibition sit within a lineage of digital drawing brought into the mainstream by artists like David Hockney. For Naessens, the approach draws on his background as a printmaker. As he explains: “Like making multi-plate etchings, these works are layered drawings. With continuous modification the image evolves similar to proofing etchings.” Naessens’s work has been shown widely, including a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2018, Good Morning Mister Turner, made in response to the gallery’s J.M.W. Turner watercolours, and a solo show at the RHA Ashford in 2025, A Walk in the Sublime. Niall Naessens is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin. 

Episodes in the Obscure opens at Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin on Saturday 12th of September, and continues to 17th October.