Festival art gallery is largest temporary space in Ireland

The ABSOLUT Festival Gallery at Galway Arts Festival will be the largest temporary gallery in Ireland this year and is the Festival’s central visual arts hub for 2013.

The gallery, which was officially opened on Sunday, rivals many international gallery spaces of this scale, covering a massive 20,000 square foot, an area the size of a football pitch. Situated in the Galway Shopping Centre, Headford Road, Galway, this warehouse space has been designed to meet the requirements of this year’s Absolut Visual Arts Festival Programme.

In what promises to be one of the visual arts highlights in Ireland this year, John Gerrard’s first major exhibition in Ireland since 2007, Cuban School features two enormous digital projections on video walls measuring 20 metres by 4 metres that deliver powerful and virtual portraits of schools built outside Havana in the 1960s.

Other visual art highlights at the ABSOLUT Festival Gallery include an exhibition by one of England’s leading artists Howard Hodgkin which examines five decades of the artist’s output as a print maker, while Ireland at Venice features Shifting Ground Ireland’s official entry at the 2012 Venice International Architecture Exhibition.

Also featured at the ABSOLUT Festival Gallery are three further Irish exhibitions from Richard Gilligan, Roísín Coyle and Pat Collins. Artistic Director of Galway Arts Festival Paul Fahy said: “This year’s Festival features a terrific visual arts programme and one of the most technically challenging we have ever undertaken. We are hugely grateful to ABSOLUT for their continued support of our programme and it has been a pleasure working with them and our artists to deliver such an exciting gallery built especially for the Festival.”

The ABSOLUT Festival Gallery, Galway Shopping Centre, Headford Road, Galway will be open daily from 11am–6pm until Sunday July 28. Admission is free.