Opening:
Thursday 13 March, 6 - 9pm
Late Night Art:
Thursday 3 April, 6 - 9pm
Closes:
Thursday 17 April, 5pm
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 5pm (except Good Friday, 18 April)
The Crush
Sian Costello
Ends 17 April 2025
The Crush is a show about obsession. The history of figuration can be seen as the capture, copy, and control of reality through images of women, land, and fruit, leashed down onto the canvas and sealed in varnish. Rooted in art- historical references, these paintings, drawings, video, and an installation of large-scale camerae obscurae together examine the dual nature of truth-telling and mythmaking of figuration, the balance between the desire for likeness and the classical ideal of creating the illusion of space upon a flat surface. I use my own body and a series of camera obscurae as instruments to magnify and distort the boundaries between what is real and what is the art “work” of composition, lighting, and painterly flair. Through this fractured lens, space opens up beyond the controlling hand of the artist for the narratives told by the subjects themselves.
About the artist
Sian Costello uses performative self-portraiture, drawing, and the camera obscura, to reexamine the hidden role of patience in the history of portraiture and figure painting. Her work reevaluates the largely uncredited position which the artist’s model has played in the history of art, the depiction of women in the western figurative tradition, and the wider ubiquity of the trivialisation of feminine-perceived labour.
Sian Costello (b. 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Limerick City, Ireland. Since graduating from Fine Art Painting in Limerick School of Art and Design in 2020, Costello has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently with her solo show Hot Child at Ormston House, Limerick. She has been the recipient of the individual bursary award from the Arts Council of Ireland and project funding from Culture Ireland. Her work has been profiled in The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, British Vogue, Another Magazine, The Visual Artist's Newsletter, and The Irish Arts Review.