Impressions in Galway.

Hello some info if your in Galway- I got selected. ;-)

Galway Arts Centre and Galway City Museum are delighted to present ‘Impressions 2010’ and ‘Chris Orr – Social Surrealist’. Both exhibitions are opening on Friday 3rd December 2010 and will run until Saturday 8th January 2011.



'Impressions' is Ireland's longest running open submission print exhibition. It encourages, promotes and exhibits the best of printmaking in Ireland. This year over 400 prints were submitted from artists around the country and over 200 were selected making this the largest impressions exhibition to date. The exhibition is free and all prints are for sale.

On Friday 3rd December at 6pm, many of the country’s established and emerging printmakers will come together for the opening of ‘Impressions 2010’. Awards will be presented to the winners of six categories. The first prize is a €1,000 purchase prize, sponsored by Galway City Council while the second prize is also a purchase prize worth €750. The Norman Ackroyd Etching Award, the Phyllis MacNamara Award and the Impressions Committee Mid Career Award will also be presented to the winners on the night. One successful emerging artist will be awarded the Lorg Printmakers Emerging Artist Award.

This year’s adjudicator John Hewitt had the tough job of selecting all the prints to be included in the exhibition and the overall winners. He described the work as being of an exceptionally high standard this year. John Hewitt is an artist based in the English South Pennines, who works primarily in the media of print and drawing. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, where he taught printmaking for 18 years.



Renowned printmaker Chris Orr R.A will officially open the exhibition at 6pm.

Later in the evening, an exhibition of Chris’s own work ‘Chris Orr R. A – Social Surrealist’ will open at Galway City Museum at 8pm. This exhibition runs alongside Impressions 2010 and also runs until Saturday 8th January 2011.



Chris Orr, until recently, ran the Royal College of Art Postgraduate Printmaking Department in London and has been making prints for many years in a variety of media. His work has been shown all over the world.

Chris sees a close affinity between printmaking, drawing and writing. His work teems with allusions, narratives, sub plots and puns. The subjects may range from New York`s Times Square to the life of the visionary artist William Blake but everything is grounded in the observed niceties and nasties of reality. His influences range from film, TV and the novel but there are serious concerns in what at first may be taken as comic. In this upcoming exhibition in Galway, some of the work has been produced from time spent in New York, Japan and China.

Chris Orr has been a frequent visitor to Ireland and has had exhibitions in the Crawford Gallery Cork, Skibereen Arts Centre and the Temple Bar Gallery Dublin. He has published a number of books most recently “The Multitude Diaries” and “Cities of Holy Dreams”. Chris Orr lives and works in London and he is a member of the Royal Academy.




Please come along to GAC's last opening of 2010, which has been an amazing year. The prints are all fantastic and are reasonably priced, with official IMF approval. We might have mulled wine, we'll see. This year we had our first commission (Alice Maher's 'Godchildren of Enantios' video), our second tour to Syracuse, USA and our first academic paper will be presented in Norway next week. The year will be wrapped up with an off site exhibition in the Triskel Arts Centre: ESB Substation in Cork City. The exhibition, "By A Route Obscure and Lonely" features work by Mara Sola Lopez, Jonathan Sammon, John O'Connell and Jan Svenkmajer (yes the Jan Svenkmajer)