Diarmuid Kelley: summer, autumn, winter and spring

Offer Waterman is pleased to announce summer, autumn, winter & spring, a solo exhibition of twenty new paintings by artist Diarmuid Kelley. A previous finalist for the BP Portrait Award and acclaimed for his portraits including HRH the Duchess of Cornwall, this will be Kelley’s tenth exhibition with the gallery and follows his sell-out show in New York at the end of 2019. Best known for his distinctive, almost cinematic approach to the staging and composition of his portraits and still life scenes, Kelley’s work evokes the effect of light falling on his subjects. His most recent paintings reveal his increasing fascination with describing the surface of things.

Kelley paints only from life, inviting his subjects to sit regularly over a period of months in a specially created ‘light chamber’ inspired by the 18th century painter Joseph Wright of Derby. The construction allows Kelley to control the effect of natural light on a subject and experiment with chiaroscuro. In a series of highly ambitious, large-scale portraits of Kelley’s regular sitters Bea and Max, the figure becomes part of a more complex tableau, in which the pattern of the Persian rug, or texture of a battered velvet chair, are as vividly described as the model’s luminous skin and hair. Inspired by the paintings of Ingres, Kelley revels in the depiction of fabrics - velvet, linen, damask, ermine – the precise character of each material instantly recognisable and visually remarkable.