Limerick City Gallery Exhibition - A Place to Stay

Blackpool Pier, Oil on Canvas 2009
The Falls Pilgrimage, Oil on Canvas 2009

Gillian Kenny - A Place to Stay

Press Release

Gillian Kenny presents her first museum exhibition of over thirty new paintings. Her sources for the work include a collection of old picture postcards, self generated images of her travels in Canada and North America and of her hometown, Limerick, Ireland. These images offer a rich vein of constructed land, city and seascape to work through. Kenny, in A Place to Stay moves from her previous direct engagement with the subject of urban spaces to these idealised or constructed representations.

Kenny's pictorial odyssey precedes from the early appropriated childhood memories of Kilkee, Co. Clare, Ireland, onto a depiction of the Dublin airport terminal with a cosy green Aer Lingus Aeroplane. Motels feature in her paintings, places she stayed in and photographed. Travelling North through upstate New York we are presented with an icon of early tourism, the spectacular visitor attraction 'Niagara Falls'. Here Kenny creates a vibrant amalgam of the falls and a trail of yellow poncho clad tourists which makes the site and the visitor one circular entity.

The social history of travel is alluded to. There is a familiarity involved, partly due to the appropriation of highly saturated Hinde and Dollard postcards. These were perhaps found in Kenny's research, as keepsakes of relatives of early holidays and reflections of mass tourism in its early stages. The destinations featured in the paintings include Blackpool, Dublin Airport, the Italian Riviera and several wonderful poolside images.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Limerick City Gallery of Art

Gillian Kenny is from Limerick in Ireland. She attended the School of Art and Design graduating from the Painting Department in 2001. She then completed a two year Masters in Fine Art and the University of Ulster in Belfast.

Gillian was awarded the Countess Markievicz medal for painting in 2000, and has received significant funding from the Arts Council to work on a variety of projects. She has been exhibiting her paintings both nationally and abroad for the last seven years.
Her recent paintings are informed by her lengthy visits to the States and Canada. Gillian is a member of Limerick Printmakers and works from her studio on site.


The Italian Rivera, Oil on Canvas 2009


The American Dream, Oil on Canvas 2009