The Sligo Wave provides an opportunity for audiences to explore Sligo’s place in the development of painting in Ireland. For over a hundred years, the county has attracted many different generations of artists to find inspiration in the ever-changing light along its rugged Atlantic coastline. This show features work that demonstrates this strong association with the medium – from the iconic painter Jack Butler Yeats, who won the silver medal for painting at the Paris Olympics in 1924 – to successive generations of artists connected to Sligo from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

While the artists represented in The Sligo Wave approach painting in myriad ways, they all have the ability to meld pigment into beautiful fields of cobalt, jade, crimson or tangerine, to offer us images that hum with an essential energy. In many of these paintings we feel a deep connection to the North-western landscape. Mountains meet the sea in dramatic form. Bog pools, foggy marshes, stars and sunlight create ethereal visions, and animals take on charged, new mystical meanings.

The themes expressed encompass the physicality, spirituality, fragility, and temporality at the heart of the human condition, articulating on canvas ancient knowledge and emotions that go beyond words. The dynamic processes that underpin these paintings find their way to the viewer in playful and unexpected ways, through abstract and figurative representation, and states of being are expressed through form, light and colour.

You are invited to contemplate these exciting gestures, from that of an electric elk, a rising swan, and a human kiss; to a winter dawn, a cluster of stars, or a sudden godbeam of light.

On the occasion of this exhibition, author Brian Leyden has written a poetic response to what it means to live and work as an artist in Sligo, which can be read in the galleries. The exhibition continues until 7 September.

The Sligo Wave is funded by Creative Ireland.