HAPPENSTANCE  is the title of a new body of work by renowned Irish artist, Martin Gale.

Happenstance, a word variously defined as “an event that might have been arranged although it was really accidental” or according to the Oxford English dictionary “an event or fact that causes or helps something to happen”, in this context the artist feels that it goes some way to describing how his paintings come about.

There are two distinct themes running through this exhibition. An ongoing series over the past few years has been tents for Gale; circus tents, marquees etc, their impact on the landscape in terms of colour and the strangeness of their presence. Here the emphasis has moved to evening and night where the illuminated tents stand against a darkened background of landscape and night skies. The effect is atmospheric, fused with a sense of anticipation while introducing an element of surprise. A tear in the seam of normality.

Gale’s landscape paintings are not about location or scenery, but are more concerned with small relatively insignificant events that happen within the landscape; a bird is startled in a wood, a walker is distracted by a flurry of avian activity in the distance, a meeting on a mountain track or a figure wanders into a silent circus compound. Brief incidents that are suspended in time, or as Seamus Heaney observed,“They hold in a single, steady, local focus the reality and anxiety of the times.”