Martin Gale was born in Worcester, England in 1949 and moved to Ireland at an early age. He studied painting and drawing at the National College of Art and Design from 1968 to 1973 and now lives and works in Co. Kildare. Martin Gale’s work focuses on the interaction between the inhabitants of contemporary Ireland and the rural landscape and the shift from rural to urban life. His meticulously composed paintings often depict isolated figures that, through the use of a dispassionate, almost clinical style, are strangely dislocated from their surroundings. Likewise, buildings sit uneasily in the landscape, though dilapidated and tumbled-down houses hint towards a reclaimation of the rural from an attempt to suburbanise the lush fields and tangled hedgegrows of the natural order.
Martin Gale represented Ireland at Young Artists ’72 in New York and at the XI Biennale de Paris in 1980. He received an Oireachtas Exhibition Award in 1973 and an RHA Annual Exhibition Award in 1991. In 1982 he was elected a member of Aosdána and in 1996 he was made a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. He is currently Keeper of the RHA. Gale exhibited as part of the Oireachtas and Irish Exhibition of Living Annual exhibitions from 1971 to 1981 and has shown at the RHA Annual Exhibition from 1990 to the present. His work has been included in several major surveys of contemporary and 20th century Irish art and a major retrospective of his work was held at the RHA Gallagher Gallery and Ulster Museum in 2004 and 2005. Gale’s work is held in numerous private collections and forms part of major public collection in Ireland including the Arts Council, AIB, Bank of Ireland, the OPW, ESB, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, and Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork.
Exhibitions with Taylor Galleries:2006 From the Midlands
2001 Hardlands
1996 Two Places
1992 Still Life Paintings
1989 New Paintings
1987 Beyond the Garden Wall
1981 Paintings www.martingale.ie