Exhibitions
Current and Past Exhibitions at Glebe Gallery are Listed Below2023 Exhibition Programme
Saturday 27th May – Friday 17th August 2023
This exhibition looks at women artists from the Glebe House and Gallery collections and explores the nature of collecting art made by women in the 20th Century and beyond.
The Derek Hill Collection boasts artworks from pivotal Irish artists such as Nora McGuinness and Nano Reid (the first Irish representatives at the Venice Biennale), Mainnie Jellett and Evie Hone. Women artists would seem to be well represented particularly as this collection ended in 1980, this is a good opportunity to access that.
The Glebe Gallery Collection is a contemporary collection began in the 1990’s, which is constantly added to. Most of these artworks were purchased from the Glebe Gallery Easter Open Art Competition so it is a good representation of contemporary artistic activity in County Donegal and in the Northwest of Ireland in general.
The exhibition will look at the strengths and weaknesses in both collections, highlight gaps, and evaluate improvements that must be made.
image, Tommy Sutton Getting in the Spuds in the Snow (1965) by Camille Souter (1929 – 2023)
2023 Easter Open Art Competition
Artists wishing to submit work for this year’s Glebe Gallery Open Art Competition should bring their work to the Glebe Gallery, Church Hill, Letterkenny, F92 WP70, on the weekends of the 18th& 19thand 25th & 26thof March, between 12.00 and 5.00pm.
Artists can submit up to four pieces and the entry fee is €4.00 per piece.
The exhibition opening will be on Good Friday the 7thof April between 4pm and 9pm and the Prize Winners will be announced in the Gallery Courtyard at 7pm. And everyone is welcome to attend.
The exhibition will run daily from Saturday the 8thuntil Sunday the 16thof April, but we’re going to close to the public at 4pm on the last day to allow artists to collect their work.
Admission to the exhibition is FREE.
Pictures must be framed and ready to hang if selected. Works not selected can be collected at any time during the exhibition.
Entrance forms and T&C can be found on our Facebook page and will be available at the Gallery when you submit.
Swallowing Geography
Friday 7 October to Wednesday 30 November 2022
“I paint in response to the world around me in an attempt to speak to it, because I can’t separate the world from myself.”
– Patrick Hall
Swallowing Geography is a dual-venue exhibition and public programme at the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House & Gallery in Donegal. The intent of this exhibition is to observe the dynamics between belonging and exclusion in response to the Donegal context. It presents the lived and imagined experiences of inhabiting space, while exploring our engagement with geographical, domestic and digital worlds.
The title Swallowing Geography is borrowed from Deborah Levy’s novella which questions the idea of home – “Is home a good place? Or just somewhere to return to?”– and expands on our perception of belonging. The exhibition attempts to share the complex narratives about securing a place in the world where belonging is measured alongside exclusion, and broadly shares experiences of migration, displacement and marginalisation.
The exhibition includes a broad selection of artworks from the Arts Council Collection by Bassam Al-Sabah, John Beattie, Carmel Benson, Pauline Bewick, Deirdre Carr, Francis Carty, Carey Clarke, Felicity Clear, Dorothy Cross, James Dixon, Genieve Figgis, Hannah Fitz, Margaret Fitzgibbon, Martin Gale, Anita Groener, Patrick Hall, Patrick Hennessy, Patrick Jolley, Eithne Jordan, Allyson Keehan, Louis le Brocquy, Ruth E Lyons, Marielle MacLeman, Eleanor McCaughey, Sibyl Montague, Ciarán Murphy, Isobel Nolan, Mairead O’hEocha, Nano Reid, Constance Short, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Rajinder Singh and Andrew Vickery; Caroline McCarthy from the Irish Museum Modern Art Collection; and new commissioned work by Donegal artists Cara Donaghey, Laura McCafferty, Eoghan McIntyre and Jill Quigley. The commissioned exhibition text is written by Emily Cooper and Dean Fee, editors of The Pig’s Back journal.
Curator Audio Tour available here.
The official opening takes place on Saturday 15 October, 6pm – 9pm, at the Regional Cultural Centre and Sunday 16 October, 2pm – 5pm, at the Glebe House & Gallery.
- Regional Cultural Centre opens Saturday 15 October to Saturday 17 December, Tuesday to Friday, 11am – 5pm, Saturday, 1pm – 5pm.
- Glebe House & Gallery opens on Friday 7 October to Wednesday 30 November, Monday to Sunday in October, 11am – 5pm / Saturday and Sunday in November, 11am – 4pm.
Events Programme
- Thursday 3 November, 7 – 8pm: Screening The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, discussion with Eimear Walshe and invited guest, at the Regional Cultural Centre.
- Saturday 12 November, 2pm: Curator Tour, Regional Cultural Centre.
- Thursday 24 November, 7 – 8.30pm: Screening Masquerades of Research: Part I & II, discussion with Padraig Robinson and invited guest, at the Regional Cultural Centre.
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Swallowing Geography is produced and presented by the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House & Gallery, curated by the Early Career Curator in residence Rachel Botha.
Kindly supported by the Arts Council Ireland, OPW – Office of Public Works, Donegal County Council, Creative Ireland and Donegal Film Office.
Cassiopeia – Later works by Stephen McKenna
2nd September – 2nd October
World-renowned artist Stephen McKenna died in 2017 and left after a wonderful lifetimes painting, his joy of life is self evident in his work. This exhibition includes landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, still-lifes, and night skies. The range of his subject matter is only matched by his ability to paint.
Stephen McKenna had a close relationship with Donegal having a house and studio here. While this exhibition focuses on his later works with most of the painting having been completed in the last fifteen years of his life there area a couple of earlier Donegal paintings for good measure
Contemporary Donegal - Glebe Gallery Myrid Carten, Áine McBride, and Cliodhna Timoney
The Glebe Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new work by three of Irelands most important early career contemporary artists and rising stars in the International art world. Myrid Carten, Áine McBride and Cliodhna Timoney have all made work that is both immediate and fresh and all three have strong ties to Donegal having been born here or lived and worked in the County at times during their careers.
Myrid Carten works in moving image. Using documentary and fiction, and often a playful combination of both, her films interrogate both the struggle for intimacy and the ways we are compromised by our pasts.
Áine McBride is an artist who works with sculpture and photographic elements, often using construction and utility materials to create instillations.
Cliodhna Timoney works across sculpture, imagery, video and sound to investigate various subjects such as place, memory, folklore, rural and vernacular culture and the nonhuman. Timoney considers specific sites of interest such as the dancefloors of rural nightclubs, the backroads of the Northwest of Ireland and the farm she grew up on as stages or arenas that hold the potential to enact intimacy, escapism, excess or destruction.
Sven Anderson - Collection 2021/2022
Duration: Infinite
Collection is a new sound installation for Glebe House and Gallery.
The sounds that form the material of the installation are drawn from Derek Hill’s collection of over 1500 phonographs. Hill’s music collection includes a range of vocal and orchestral recordings dating as far back as the early 1900s. Many of these records compile rare recordings that capture the voices of famous opera singers throughout their dramatic careers.
In this installation, fragments from a selection of these recordings have been transformed into delicate acoustic textures that stretch away from Glebe House down to Lough Gartan.
The installation progresses through a series of movements that sway between the euphoric and the melancholic, echoing the successes and failures that define the lives of the singers and composers that they recall. Bordered by stretches of silence, these movements allow other sounds to come in and out of focus within the landscape.
Collectioncan be heard between 11AM and 6PM every day of the week, emerging from the western side of Glebe House on the opposite side of the wall from where Hill used to listen to his records inside. The installation can be experienced from different locations outside of the house and within the surrounding gardens.
To complement the sound installation launched in summer 2021, Collectionwill include a limited-edition vinyl LP that will be released in spring 2022.
More information is available online at: http://collection.svenanderson.net
27th May – 30th July
This exhibition looks at women artists from the Glebe House and Gallery collections and explores the nature of collecting art made by women in the 20th Century and beyond.
The Derek Hill Collection boasts artworks from pivotal Irish artists such as Nora McGuinness and Nano Reid (the first Irish representatives at the Venice Biennale), Mainnie Jellett and Evie Hone. Women artists would seem to be well represented particularly as this collection ended in 1980, this is a good opportunity to access that.
The Glebe Gallery Collection is a contemporary collection began in the 1990’s, which is constantly added to. Most of these artworks were purchased from the Glebe Gallery Easter Open Art Competition so it is a good representation of contemporary artistic activity in County Donegal and in the Northwest of Ireland in general.
The exhibition will look at the strengths and weaknesses in both collections, highlight gaps, and evaluate improvements that must be made.
image, Tommy Sutton Getting in the Spuds in the Snow (1965) by Camille Souter (1929 – 2023)
Bassam Al-Sabah, Aideen Barry, & Sean Hillen
Three contemporary artists explore themes relating to Saint Colm Cille, born beside the Glebe Gallery 1500 years ago. Bassam Al-sabah, Aideen Barry, and Sean Hillen look at topics like authenticity, worth, journeys, relocation and repositioning.
Bassam Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance. Themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology are explored through reference to Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to today.
Aideen Barry is a performance artist who also makes animations, films, drawings and sculptures. She looks at the familiar and reinterprets it.Barry feels at odds with the way things are and out of place in the world. She asks her audience to observe amplified behaviours and to look a their own humanity.
Sean Hillen works in many mediums but is best known for his collages. He takes a wary look at Irish life and how we consume information and propaganda. Hillen looks at how we move through our world and navigate every day life and attribute worth to our surroundings and inner selves.
An Tír Mhór - Summer 2020
When we realized that we could not go ahead with our planned exhibition program for 2020 we decided to look at our own collection and try to find a fresh approach to exhibiting it. Some of our most important artworks are in this show but there are also pictures that almost never get exhibited as well.
Pictures are grouped together two meters apart to help with physical distancing so this is a much smaller exhibition than we would normally mount. The extra space has allowed us to look deeper at some of the artworks with more comprehensive labels. Each staff member was asked to choose their favorite works from the collection and compose the labels for them. We also used our social media to ask for suggestions.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Locky Morris
8th September – 3rd November, 2019
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21st Century Ireland in 21 Artworks
Curated by Cristín Leach
13th July – 14th September 2019
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Line of Inquiry – Rian Kerrane
9th September 2018
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Tradition and Innovation
A selection of works from the RHA collection
8th July – 12nd September 2018
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Proscenium
Helena Gorey
27th May – 31st June 2018
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Glebe Gallery Easter Open Art Competition Exhibition 2018
31st March – 8th April
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Point and Click – Six Photographers from the North West of Ireland
4th August – 39th September 2017 (closed Fridays)
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SPACE – An Exhibition About The World
SPACE investigates how artists decode the world we have made for ourselves. Encompassing many socially aware art forms with works by leading Irish and International artists, this exhibition takes the built and imagined environment as a broad theme and examines inclusion/exclusion and the human experience.
Ranging from Islamic architectural drawing to Arts and Carft design, from Victorian painting to contemporary art, and including works by Marina Abramović, Josef Albers, Helen Maria Vieira da Silva, Grayson Perry, Antony Gormley, Graham Sutherland, Edwin Landseer, Jack Butler Yeats, Maud Cotter, Camille Souter, and Norah McGuinness.
1st July – 3rd September, 2017
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PRESENCE
An exhibition drawn from the Glebe Gallery Collection
27th May – 29th June, 2017 (closed Fridays)
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Annual Easter Open Art Competition 2017
Annual Easter Open Art Competition
26th March – 3rd April, 2016
The annual Easter Exhibition showing works by many artists from the North West of Ireland will run from Saturday 26th March until Sunday 2nd April 2016. The opening will be held on the evening of Friday 25th March at 7pm.
Trinity’s ‘College Gallery’: The Swing of the Sixties
4th July – 27th September 2015
The Glebe Gallery is delighted to present a special selection of 20th century works from The Trinity College Dublin Art Collections. Originally conceived by Lismore Castle Arts with invited curator and Trinity alumnus Richard Wood, the exhibition features key Irish and international pieces by Josef Albers, Karel Appel, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Patrick Collins, Barrie Cooke, Micheal Farrell, Robert Indiana, Cecil King, Roy Lichtenstein, Nano Reid, Patrick Scott, William Scott, Peter Sedgley, and Victor Vasarely, accompanied by a portrait of George Dawson by Mick O’Dea.
Hunter: An exhibition by Sarah Lewtas
28th May – 28th June 2015
Sarah Lewtas has lived and worked in Co Donegal for over thirty years and has previously contributed to a number of exhibitions here at the Glebe Gallery. This is her first solo exhibition in this gallery and includes work produced over a period of years and in a variety of media – from drawing to video and from books bound in crow’s wings to sewn and quilted installations.
For further information you can download the exhibition catalogue here.
To visit Sarah’s website click here.
An Exhibition of Ceramics by Con Lynch
7th September – 28th September 2014
Con Lynch is a Sligo-based ceramicist. The pots in this exhibition are all recent works. They are made from clays and glazes Con collected in the North West of Ireland. The show is intensely beautiful.
Many of the pots are Raku fired. The term Raku, in Japanese, means ‘enjoyment’, ‘satisfaction’, or ‘comfort’. The word refers to a type of ware and also to an entire process and belief. It originated in the sixteenth century during the construction of a palace in Kyoto called Jurakudai. Before the mid-twentieth century American potters, working in Japan, had become familiar with the process of Raku firing and, on returning home, began experimenting with the fast firing and cooling. From these experiments grew the practice of contempory Raku.
Patrick Scott: Image Space Light
14th July – 29th August 2014
Following the widely acclaimed exhibition at IMMA and VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, The Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House and Gallery, present Patrick Scott: IMAGE SPACE LIGHT as a single exhibition across the two venues to bring to public attention the breadth and distinction of his career as an artist, designer and architect.
Scott’s unique vision has consistently pursued formal rigour and experimentation through the calibration of line, image, space and light. He is renowned as the first Irish exponent of pure abstraction. At The Regional Cultural Centre the second part of Scott’s career is presented with a display of the artist’s tapestries, a medium in which he is matched by few in the history of 20th century design, and a selection of superlative Gold Paintings ranging in date from the 1960s to the present day. Also at the RCC are examples of Scott’s folding screens, the Tables for Meditation, and various suites of work on paper including the Gestural drawings and the Meditations prints.
The paintings exhibited at Glebe House range across the naïve style birds in schematic landscapes of the artist’s White Stag related work during the 1940s, the urban and domestic inspired ‘structural’ compositions of the 1950s, the soaked canvases of the bog and lakeland ‘process’ paintings and the explosive beauty of poured and dripped painting in the Device works of the early 1960s. There is also an early example of the contemplative Gold Paintings that combine in infinite permutations the textures of raw canvas, white tempera and gold leaf, arguably Scott’s signature expression. The Glebe Gallery also includes Scott’s design work during the 1950s and 60s and works related to ROSC ’67.
BE(LONGING): Selena Mowat at the Glebe Gallery
31st May – 1st July 2014
This was Donegal-based Scottish artist, Selena Mowat’s, first major show. Mowat was the winner of Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year (Ireland) in 2013, and a graduate of Art and Design in the University of Dundee. This exhibition collected thirty portraits and twenty landscapes.
“The exhibition is called (Be)longing as it’s central theme is about the sense of belonging to a place and I painted the works in three different places.” – Mowat.
The Road Taken/ An Bóthar Taistealta: Derek Hill’s Donegal Legacy
7 July – 29 September 2013
Derek Hill lived in Donegal for 50 years and in that time he brought a host of iconic cultural figures to visit Donegal, contributing significantly to the local arts scene.
The Road Taken looks what happens when you choose the more interesting path, the challenges and rewards resulting from taking the more uncertain road. In Hill’s case it brought him to County Donegal, a place whose beauty and people he wanted to share with his friends.
This exhibition sought to explore Hill’s effect on the arts in Donegal and included works by internationally renowned artists like Henry Moore, Sidney Nolan, Jack Yeats, Victor Pasmore, Josef Beuys and Victor Vasarely, as well as the many Irish Artists he became close to. It also contained a wealth of never before seen archival material.
Derek Hill once inspired legendary British composer Benjamin Britten to compose a choral work in commemoration of Saint Colmcille. To celebrate the centenary of Britten’s birth, his Hymn to St. Columba was performed at the opening of the exhibition on Sunday the 7th of July at 4pm.
The Glebe Gallery/Office of Public Works presented this exhibition in association with Earagail Arts Festival.
The Donegal Hills: Derek Hill’s Donegal Paintings
1 August – 3 October 2010
On the tenth anniversary of the death of Derek Hill the Office of Public Works exhibited a collection of his paintings. The Donegal Hills celebrated Derek’s life in Donegal with portraits and landscapes drawn from public and private collections throughout Ireland and the UK.
Some highlights from the exhibition are presented here. All images are copyrighted to the Office of Public Works, and all originals are in the Derek Hill Collection at Glebe House and Gallery.
You can download a a low-resolution PDF of the exhibition catalogue here.
