Diarmuid Kelly: 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.

“If you spend your life looking at objects you become obsessed with the patina with the roughness or smoothness with the touch and the feel of things. You want them to somehow feel palpable. I don’t consciously think about trying to describe things like that. It just happens as if by magic ... and it's magical when it does.”

Kelley’s still lifes offer him greater opportunity for experimentation. In the past these smaller works “were mostly about colour and tone”; the placement of a few select objects became the vehicle through which to explore colour in an abstract way. As with his portraits Kelley has become increasingly interested in capturing the surface texture of these objects - the crumbling glaze on a terracotta jug or the familiar powdery bloom of a tulip leaf. 

Offer Waterman Gallery 17 St George Street London W1S 1FJ UK Exhibition Dates: Friday 28 March – Wednesday 30 April 2025

(Closed on Good Friday and Easter Saturday)

Exhibition Hours: Tuesday – Friday 11am–5pm Saturdays 11am–4pm 

Host or Publisher Offer Waterman