We're delighted to have secured a new work by Dermot Smyth - an artist whose reputation has been building with real substance, through recent exhibitions including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Tapestry (90 × 120 cm, oil on linen, £7,950) is part of a new body of work centred on the Dutch barn - structures that are so embedded in the rural landscape they're often barely registered. Smyth isolates them, brings them forward, and in doing so shifts their role entirely. What might once have been incidental becomes the focus. The barn is no longer in the landscape - it stands against it.
There's something particularly resolved about this painting. The structure is held low and wide, almost compressed into the picture plane, while the space around it is reduced to broad, quiet passages of colour. The effect is both grounding and slightly disorientating - familiar, but not fixed.
As always with Smyth, the surface carries the tension. Up close, it's worked, adjusted, built through instinctive decisions; at a distance, it settles into something measured and calm. That balance - between uncertainty and control - is where the painting holds.
This new series is already proving significant. We're very pleased to have this example here and hope you will enjoy seeing it 'in the flesh' as much as we do. We look forward to welcoming you soon.
