Gerard Byrne

Exhibitions

14 January - 3 April 2011

This exhibition will be Gerard Byrne’s first major solo show in a UK public gallery. It presents the culmination of his ten years of research around the Loch Ness Monster, the myth fuelled in the 1930s by the popular press in order to sell newspapers. Including photography, film, text, sound and archival material, this project blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, exploring how images inform our understanding of myth and reality. Byrne presents his own evidence of the monster’s existence, posing the question: is it possible to capture an image of something that does not exist?

Byrne was born in 1969 in Dublin where he lives and works. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (1994) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts (2006), Byrne represented Ireland in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Major presentations of his work have been included in the biennales of Gwangju and Sydney in 2008, Lyon in 2007, the Tate Triennial in 2006, and the Istanbul Biennale in 2003.

Byrne’s work is primarily lens based, in film, video, and photography. The film / video projects involve reconstructing particular historically charged conversations originally published in popular magazines from the 1960s -1980s, including visions of the future by science fiction writers. Developing out of his interest in acting and theatre as cultural forms, Byrne has worked on a number of projects with actors and sets in gallery spaces which test the historical distinctions between sculpture and set design, acting and non-acting, and spectacle and spectator.