Third Eye

Closing The Circle

Ice

Coast

Fire

Place

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About

The Paintings of Rachel Gallagher

There are places where our imaginations want to journey. Places that feed our dreams and arouse our curiosity. Such places take us beyond the commotion of the everyday. It can be difficult to find these places, our memories are clogged with debris, we remember the pleasure of shifted consciousness, but find the location slippery.

The first pleasure when encountering the paintings of Rachel Gallagher is to relish the physicality of the work – the paint, colour, texture and composition. The delight is rewarding and satisfying. She applies paint in deep glazes, gritty surface and thick impasto. There are swift brush strokes, and sharp scratches. The push and rub of the finger against paint is self evident. The reality of the painting is satisfying, it is physical, it is optical. The saturated colour – salmons and tangerines, unbleached creams, inky blues the colour of starlit nights, greys, blacks and a myriad of whites – the visual leads the narrative, taking us to the psychological territory of the paintings.

Often the paint is scrapped off, returning to the source of the work. Construction, destruction, and further invention all combine until there is a presence into which the artist invites us to travel.

Beyond the sensory there are other rewards. One is drawn across the edge of experience to a memory – a seascape, a landscape, a piece of architecture ambiguously pictured – that takes us into a world that is beyond reality. Many of the paintings suggest a calm, idyllic place, while in others there is restlessness and animation. Just as we think we have reached these painted destinations reality slips and slides and we are lost again until we can once again grasp the visual narrative.

These images, invented by the artist, are almost recognisable and yet they are not exactly identifiable. The work is richly suggestive, almost familiar and ambiguous at the same time. We must exercise our imaginations and suspend conscious thought in order to fully appreciate the quality of the work.

BIOGRAPHY

RACHEL GALLAGHER was born in 1953 and educated at Wycombe Abbey School, Loughborough College of Art and Design, and the City and Guilds of London Art School. She works as a painter producing abstract work depicting time and place in oil on canvas and pastel on paper. She also makes abstract flat panel enamels. Rachel shows regularly in London and Ireland and is in a number of public collections.

Solo Shows

2014 Darren Baker Gallery, London
2011-2016 Oxfordshire Artweeks
2010 - 2013 
Art Weeks, Oxford
2010 Warren Gallery, West Cork
2008 Aire Gallery, Dover Street, London W1
2002 Aire Gallery, Dover Street, London W1
2000 Conningsbury Gallery, London WC1
1998 Art Box, London WC1

Group Shows

2015 Wychwood Art at the AAF
2012
 Warren Gallery, West Cork
2004 - 2011 Arts House at the Affordable Art Fair
2009 Warren Gallery, London
2009 Warren Gallery, Dublin
1997 The Japanese and European Art Exhibition, London E1
1996 Post Graduate Show, City and Guilds of London Art School
1995 Degree Show, Loughborough College of Art

Public Collections

Loughborough University
The Higher Education Funding Committee

Work also included in Channel 5's Hot Property and House and Garden Interior Design Show.

CONTACT

The majority of the work on this site is for sale. To enquire about price and availability please email me at rachel@rachelgallagher.com

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