Studio

A cozy living room corner with a white brick wall decorated with multiple pieces of artwork, including a dark abstract piece, a skeleton-like image, and a portrait of a person smoking. In front of the wall, there is a wood stove burning with flames visible, and a bucket labeled 'Sheep Fleece' with a shovel inside. On the floor, there's a pile of sheets and a blanket, beside a ladder leaning against the wall. A patterned rug covers part of the floor.

Gallagher’s work hovers, rather obstinately, between figuration and abstraction. He resists the tidy categories so beloved of curators, insisting instead on a visual language that acknowledges the fractured reality of human experience. The figures he conjures are distorted, splintered, and often grotesque; yet in their very disfigurement they approach a kind of honesty. Life, after all, is seldom neat or symmetrical. To seek perfection in paint would be an affectation, while to revel in its imperfections is closer to truth.

Encountered at close quarters, his canvases are dense with physicality. The paint is not merely applied but heaped, carved, dragged into place until it resembles something almost geological. Thick impasto oils glisten against passages of marbled texture; elsewhere, the unexpected gleam of gold leaf or the crystalline grit of diamond dust interrupts the surface, as if to remind us that beauty and brutality often coexist.

Watch the studio film

The fragmented details coalesce into something far more disquieting: a body, perhaps, or the suggestion of one, caught between recognition and dissolution.