Oisín Byrne's exhibition at Mount Stuart
This summer, Mount Stuart will introduce Oisín Byrne - an Irish cross-media artist - for their first exhibition in Scotland. The starting point for Byrne’s project will be one of the less well-known collections at Mount Stuart house: its Gaelic and Irish books and pamphlets.
The exhibition, running from 31st August until 20th October 2024, will include a new series of paintings - large and small scale - with a linguistic focus.
In these paintings, markings and glyphs from the archive are combined with graphology from writers from Byrne’s own library; Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, Clarice Lispector, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag and Frank O' Hara, as interlopers to the Mount Stuart collection. This body of work furthers Byrne’s interest in creating multi-layered works combining found texts and research with fragments from his own notebooks - as if in an attempt to understand or communicate something of the complexity and non-coherence of “the self”.
The new paintings will be complemented by live performance, accompanied by a string quartet. Over the past four years, Byrne has been producing a collection of songs, which he describes as 'sardonic pop music', based on excerpts from his notebooks. Byrne has worked with Naoise Hardiman May to orchestrate his electro pop songs to acoustic strings and a series of these recordings and their accompanying video works will be dispersed throughout the house.
Byrne’s exhibition combines paintings, installation, live performance and film to create an immersive experience for visitors to Mount Stuart.
