Location
Gallery MC, 545 W 52nd St, FL 1, NY, NY, 10019
Exhibition Dates
Tuesday February 17 - Monday, February 23, 10 - 6pm
Drinks Reception
Saturday February 21, 2 - 5pm
Exhibiting Artists
George Bolster, Helen O’Leary, Martin Mullin, Mike Dowley, Lisa McCleary, alongside a work by Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland.
Curatorial Statement
Tether brings together Irish visual artists living and working in New York, exploring the invisible lines that bind us across distance, time, and place.
To be Irish abroad is often to live in a state of tension: between departure and return, inheritance and reinvention, belonging and estrangement. A tether is not a chain, it allows movement, drift, and transformation, yet it holds. It suggests attachment without confinement, connection without stasis. For artists shaped by Ireland and practicing elsewhere, this tether is felt in language, memory, landscape, politics, family, and the body itself.
The works in this exhibition do not attempt to define Irishness as a fixed identity. Instead, they trace how it is carried, resisted, reimagined, or quietly endured. Some artists pull against the tether, testing its limits; others lean into it, allowing it to ground their practice.
Set in New York a city deeply entwined with Irish histories of emigration and labor, Tether situates these practices within a global art context while remaining attentive to origin. The exhibition also honors the legacy of Brian O’Doherty, whose conceptual rigor and engagement with language and space continue to influence Irish artistic practice across generations.
Together, the works in Tether reveal Irish identity as dynamic and unresolved, stretched across geographies, shaped by migration, and continually rewritten through making. The exhibition offers a space for reflection on how we remain connected to what formed us, even as we move through new worlds, carrying those ties quietly within us.
2025
Watered Soil
2025
oil on panel
24” x 36”
(61cm x 91cm)
2022
Soft #2
2022
oil on panel
24” x 36”
(61cm x 91cm)
Seeds
2022
oil on panel
24” x 36”
(61cm x 91cm)
Crawl
2022
oil on panel
24” x 36”
(61cm x 91cm)
It Trickled So Slowly That No One Noticed
2022
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
All I Wanted
2022
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
2021
Turmoil
2021
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
2021
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
Heavy Silence
2021
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
Chancer
2021
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
Laugh Lines
2021
oil on panel
16” x 20”
(41cm x 51cm)
2020
Untitled (07/16/2020)
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”
Untitled (07/16/2020) (detail)
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”
Untitled (07/22/2020)
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”
Untitled (07/22/2020) (detail)
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”
2020
oil on panel
36” x 24”