RHA President and Curator of Cnuasach Sínead Ní Mhaonaigh will provide a tour and informal discussion with exhibiting artists Joanne Boyle and Jason Gubbioti.
Cnuasach, a group exhibition in the Dr. Tony Ryan Gallery, brings together twenty-one artists in a dialogue between established and emerging artists. Featuring eleven Members of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts alongside ten invited artists, the exhibition creates a space for exchange and discovery across generations, practices and perspectives.
The exhibition presents four recurring themes: landscape, portraiture, grids and abstraction. While distinct in their histories and visual languages, these subjects provide a framework through which the artists explore questions of perception, structure, space, memory and approaches to image-making.
Landscape appears as a site of observation, recollection and transformation, while portraiture offers a means of considering identity, presence and our relationship to place. The grid introduces ideas of order, repetition and systems, but can equally become a point of tension or disruption. Abstract practices move beyond direct representation, inviting viewers to engage with colour, gesture, surface and form on their own terms.
By bringing Academy Members together with invited artists, the exhibition places different approaches in conversation, allowing unexpected connections and contrasts to emerge. Rather than proposing a single definition of contemporary practice, Cnuasach emphasises the range of ways in which artists engage with paint, image, material and form.
Moving from recognisable imagery towards more open-ended forms of expression, the exhibition considers how established artistic languages continue to be questioned, reworked and extended through contemporary practice.
Exhibiting artists include:
Tinka Bechert, John Bensons, George Bolster, Joanne Boyle, Elaine Byrne ARHA, Amanda Coogan, Dorothy Cross RHA, Martin Gale RHA, Jason Gubbiotti, Pat Harris RHA, Eithne Jordan RHA, Elva Mulchrone, Abigail O’Brien PPRHA, Maria Simonds-Gooding RHA, Geraldine O’Neill RHA, Armelle Skatulski, Tamsin Snow, Charles Tyrrell RHA and Michael Wolf.
Joanne Boyle is a painter based in Dublin, Ireland. Her work explores embodiment through the mimetic nature of substances. Experimenting with the fundamentals of structure, viscosity and plasticity as a catalyst for new work. Using oil paint, household gloss paint, pigmented polymer, working on built surfaces such as wood, canvas, ceramic and paper. The painting centres around utilising techniques of control and play such as pouring, syringing, blowing, dripping, playing with density, weight and material composition. Forming, shaping and preparing the underlay for paint is now as important as the surface. Boyle’s work invests significant attention to developing grounds, its forms and the shapes holding the paint, bringing new tensions and dynamism to the work. These surfaces are then prepared over time allowing her to sit with all aspects of the piece. Every surface is considered, from how the work is handled, how it feels in hand, to how it is hung. The imagery on these works come from a deep understanding of how paint itself works.
Joanne Boyle’s practice includes working in non-traditional art settings, facilitating art classes and workshops. This practice includes collaborating with youth groups, young people in care settings, early school leavers, community art projects for adults with special needs, homeless shelters across Dublin, St. Patrick’s Mental Health Hospital, women-only focused groups and adults and young people in the prison services.
Exhibitions include Ireland, Northern Ireland, US, UK and Beijing.
Selected solo show; Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow, Ireland. Selected group shows; Cnuasach, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland; Permission|Slip, Canopy Studio, New York, USA; The Lido Open, Margate, UK; It Rose and It Fell, Terrace Gallery, London, UK; Layers, The Department Store, London, UK; Connections, Boyle Arts Festival, Ireland; The Pleasure Ground, Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, Ireland.
Jason Gubbiotti lives and works in the countryside, just outside of Paris, France. He received his BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 1998. In 2025, He became a fellow at Ballinglen in County Mayo, Ireland.
In 1994, Jason moved to Washington, D.C. to attend The Corcoran College of Art and Design and continued to live in Washington until 2004. In the Spring of 2004, he moved to Metz, France. In August of 2007, he moved to Fribourg, Switzerland. In January of 2013, he relocated to Chantilly, France where he continues to live and work. Since 1998, Gubbiotti has shown his work throughout the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland and London, England. He has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions in cities throughout the US and Europe, including The Wexner Center, (Columbus, Ohio), The Orange County Museum of Art (California), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,
(Texas), Kunsthalle Fribourg (Switzerland), Stadtgalerie (Saarbrücken, Germany), Flowers Gallery (London) and the Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin).
His work is in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C., and the Ballinglen Museum of Art, Ballycastle, Ireland.
His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Papers, Frieze, New Art Examiner, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Modern Art Notes, Two Coats of Paint, and the Irish Arts Review amongst others.
In 2007, he received a Bourse d’aide à la création, Direction Régionale des Affaires
Culturelles, Metz, France. In 2001. He was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Award and in 1997 he received a Vermont Studio Center Artist Grant.
Besides exhibitions, Jason has been a visiting artist at American University in Washington, DC, University of Ohio, Saint Mary’s College in Maryland and Lycée Classique de Diekirch, Luxembourg. Gubbiotti has written for Turps Painting Magazine out of London, England along at HOLLER from Ashville, North Carolina. He is currently a mentor at Turps Banana, London.
Image: Joanne Boyle, PSN-Parasympathetic Nervous System, 2025, Oil on linen, 90 x 90cm, Image courtesy of the artist.
