Gerard Byrne

Gerard Byrne works primarily in video, photography and performance art. His multi-media installations reenact historic events using professional actors and theatrical techniques, using twentieth-century literature and mass media as source material. Referencing a range of literary and theatrical sources, his work considers how images are constructed and communicated.

In 2007 he represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale. Other major presentations of his work at international biennials include the biennales of Gwangju and Sydney in 2008, Lyon in 2007, the Tate Triennial in 2006, and the Istanbul Biennale in 2003.

He has exhibited extensively, including a significant solo show at IMMA in 2011 entitled Through the Eyes.  Other solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the ICA Boston and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (both 2008), Dusseldorf Kunstverein, the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2007), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003) and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2002). In 2006 he was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn award.¹

Working primarily with lens-based media, Gerard Byrne explores the paradoxical relationship between time and image. Looking at both highbrow and popular media, from the art press to men’s magazines, museum displays to commercial radio stations, Byrne meticulously documents and reconstructs the cultural ephemera of the last century. With deadpan humour, his works draw attention to the ways in which text, sound and image produce and transmit meaning, and how shifting contexts render this meaning impermanent. In particular his works have looked at the legacy of Modernism, evolving attitudes towards sexuality, and the move from collective sources of entertainment to the more fragmented media culture of the 21st Century. Never succumbing to nostalgia, Byrne’s analysis of the recent past and its mythologies tells us just as much about the present – how, far from being inevitable, the moment we live in is just one of a number of possible outcomes, and how alternative futures can live on through cultural artefacts.²