Curated by Nicola Lane

Karl Somers graduated from Sligo IT with a BA in 2000 and went on to The National College of Art and Design where he graduated in 2004 with a Masters Degree. Since then he has had a number of exhibitions in the UK and in Ireland. Most recently he participated in Quies, a group show in The Edwardian Cloak Room, Bristol, and had a solo show in the Ballyroan Library in July 2015.

Somers also worked alongside his partner, Nicola Lane to co-found an artist-led contemporary art space called Platform in 2011 and since then the pair have worked together on a number of projects including the Trove exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

Somers tends to work fast, and on multiple paintings – anything from 5 to 10 paintings at any one time. He uses a playful, colourful approach to address darker themes, and influences include painters such as Camille Souter, Jean-Michel Basquiat,L S Lowry and Brian Maguire.

“The works in “SHOW 5” are largely inspired by the place of their making – where I live in Meath. The cherry tree under which much of the work was started, the surrounding wheat fields, the harvest skyline, and the fact that we live on the flight path to Dublin Airport.

The paintings themselves are colour poems. The pallet and painting technique employed reflect these surroundings, responding to the seasons, which then get over-laid through use of underpainting and glazing, with cherry blossom pinks merging with wheaten golds to create an almost idealised reflection of the place. Unreal, romanticised.

As throughout all my work, there are recurrent themes of the city, and landscape structures such as pylons and telegraph poles. The frenetic activity of the airport, and its ever increasing workload, as another generation is displaced, has also seeped into the work. All this is transmuted through the candy coloured pallet, sweetening the bitter pill. Powerful icons have been transposed into playful motifs using pinks, oranges and muted whites.” Karl Somers, 2016